Architecture

This server is designed to be running persistently in the background, making it suitable for deployment to a virtual machine or container instance.

Console

The console is a wrapper for the experiment orchestrator coupled with mechanisms for authentication and authorization of experiment resources.

The console allows the user to see their actively running experiments.

The console interacts with an ExperimentOrchestrator that does most of the heavy lifting.

Experiment Orchestrator

The experiment orchestrator manages experiment state. Its primary function is to keep track of actively running experiments in memory and store handles to them.

To keep track of all past experiments, a separate SQLite database is used.

Experiment

The experiment contains a handle to an actively running experiment environment. It uses the handle to send commands to the environment.

Experiments are wrappers for connections to environments.

Experiments can be run synchronously using WebSockets or asynchronously using step-based HTTP requests.

TODO: Give example.

(Eventually the orchestrator will launch a container using an EnvSpec containing its location.)

Runtime Connection

The RuntimeConnection is the penultimate level of abstraction for an environment.

It can be used to communicate with anything from a Grid World simulation or a Minecraft game instance.

Subclasses are ultimately responsible for implementing the runtime connection API.