Using the Virtual Experiments Registry UI

The ST4SD Registry UI is a web-based UI designed to provide information at a glance about virtual experiments. You can watch a quick video walkthrough of the registry here:

The homepage of the Registry UI gives users an overview of the available parameterised virtual experiment packagess. allowing them to filter the results by domain, platform, or surrogate status, as shown in the screenshot below:

Upon clicking on one of the entries, users will be presented with three sections containing detailed information about the experiment.

The first section serves two purposes: a) give immediate access to the interface (description, measured properties, inputs, etc) of the virtual experiment, and b) provide a visual feedback about how well the experiment adheres to best practices.

Clicking the progress indicator on the right opens a panel where developers can read how they can improve their virtual experiments to get the most out of the features provided by ST4SD and why each element is important.

This section describes the available options to customize the execution of a parameterisable virtual experiment package. Users may override variables, runtime arguments, environment variables, and platform of the resulting virtual experiment instance.

In the Execution options section, users can see what parameters they can customize. Depending on the developer settings, users may specify an arbitrary value for parameters, or choose between a list of choices. Finally, the Preset parameters section, presents the parameters users cannot override. The developers pre-configure these parameters when they push the parameterised package to the registry.

This section contains information about the internals of the parameterised package, such as the list of base packages, container images used in the virtual experiment, and developer-provided metadata. For virtual experiment definitions hosted on Git, the users also get the option to report problems by opening Github issues. The issues, automatically include relevant information to help the developers debug the problem. For example, the commit and branch/tag of the repository containing the definition of this particular version of the virtual experiment.

The registry also displays all available revisions of the parameterised virtual experiment package in the History section. The table includes the current/previous tags, and the creation date of revisions. Clicking on a digest opens a new page with point-in-time data about that specific revision of the experiment, allowing users to see how the parameterised virtual experiment package looked in the past.

Users can also quickly download the experiment package entry or import it directly in their own ST4SD Runtime Service instance using the button or the Python code provided at the bottom of the page.