Consolidation of Random Seed String Conversion

Consolidation of Random Seed String Conversion

Better Synchronization and IOException Propagation in Output API

We now have much better synchronization and propagation of IOExceptions in the part of our experimentation system where log files are created and written. It is now ensured that there can never be more than one file system operation in parallel when multiple threads are executed in order to prevent and problem with shared folders. Moreover, IOExceptions that may occur are now propagated directly, which makes the Experimentation API implementation internally simpler.

Further Reduced File System Operations in Experimentation API

If we work on a shared drive, the file system operations are the most likely operations to cause problems.
With this release, we further reduce them a bit.
We now remember which directories already exist and also directly try to create files from which we do not know whether they exist without first checking for their existence.
This should reduce the number of file system operations per log file by 2.
As a result, the experiment execution should become a bit more reliable.
It should already be quite reliable if you work on your local PC or if you have few involved processes or a fast connection to the shared drive.
But if I run big experiments with many threads, I sometimes get I/O errors and thus, automatic restarts.
With this release, we try to further reduce those.

Minor Service Release 2

I call it "minor service release" .. but actually I just had to remove a "final" declaration that was in the way of one of my experiments. Sorry.

Minor Service Release

had to fix a minor issue and make it available as release ... the important release is 0.8.12

Parallel Experiment Execution Facility

The experiment execution facility is now parallelized.
The different threads share information about runs that have already been performed or are in progress.
This reduces the file system operations and can thus both speed up the experiment execution and increase the robustness.

New Experiment Execution Facility

The experiment execution facility has finally been codified, based on experiences with real-world experiments.
(Also the Trap Function has been added as example for hard bit-string problems.)

smarter log file creation

added optional predicate to log file creation

fixed command line argument logging

The command line parameter logging now does not put many strange "?"s anymore, instead just " ".
We also log the session start time.

better log processing + now logging system/hardware information

The log processing has been somewhat improved, but is still in the early stages.
The idea is that you can conveniently parse the data from the log files and get some basic statistics and stuff from them.

We now also include more system in the data in our log files using oshi.
These information include processor type, speed, memory size, and operating system data.
With this, it should become easier to understand the measured runtimes and performance as well as to later identify on which computer the experiments were run.