EDACC - An Advanced Platform for the Experiment Design, Administration and Analysis of Empirical Algorithms

The design, execution and analysis of experiments using heuristic algorithms can be a very time consuming task in the development of an algorithm. There are a lot of problems that have to be solved throughout this process. To speed up this process we have designed and implemented a framework called EDACC, which supports all the tasks that arise throughout the experimentation with algorithms. A graphical user interface together with a database facilitates archiving and management of solvers and problem instances. It also enables the creation of complex experiments and the generation of the computation jobs needed to perform the experiment. The task of running the jobs on an arbitrary computer system (or computer cluster or grid) is taken by a compute client, which is designed to increase computation throughput to a maximum. Real-time monitoring of running jobs can be done with the GUI or with a web frontend, both of which provide a wide variety of descriptive statistics and statistic testing to analyze the results. The web frontend also provides all the tools needed for the organization and execution of solver competitions.