=============
About Sumatra
=============

Sumatra is a tool for managing and tracking projects based on numerical
simulation and/or analysis, with the aim of supporting reproducible research.
It can be thought of as an automated electronic lab notebook for computational
projects.

It consists of:

* a command-line interface, smt, for launching simulations/analyses with
  automatic recording of information about the experiment, annotating these
  records, linking to data files, etc.
* a web interface with a built-in web-server, smtweb, for browsing and
  annotating simulation/analysis results.
* a Python API, on which smt and smtweb are based, that can be used in your own
  scripts in place of using smt, or could be integrated into a GUI-based
  application.

Sumatra is currently alpha code, and should be used with caution and frequent
backups of your records.

For documentation, see http://packages.python.org/Sumatra/ and http://neuralensemble.org/sumatra/

    
Intended functionality (not all implemented yet):

    * launch simulations and analyses, and record various pieces of information,
      including:
      
        - the executable (identity, version)
        - the script (identity, version)
        - the parameters
        - the duration (execution time)
        - console output
        - links to all data (whether in files, in a database, etc.) produced by
          the simulation/analysis
        - the reason for doing the simulation/analysis
        - the outcome of the simulation/analysis
        
    * allow browsing/searching/visualising the results of previous experiments
    * allow the re-running of previous simulations/analyses with automatic
      verification that the results are unchanged
    * launch single or batch experiments, serial or parallel
    

============
Requirements
============

Sumatra requires Python versions 2.6 or 2.7. The web interface requires
Django (>= 1.4) and the django-tagging package.
Sumatra requires that you keep your own code in a version control
system (currently Subversion, Mercurial, Git and Bazaar are supported). If you
are already using Mercurial or Bazaar there is nothing else to install. If you
are using Subversion you will need to install the pysvn package. If you using
Git, you will need to install git-python bindings.


============
Installation
============

These instructions are for Unix, Mac OS X. They may work on Windows as well, but
it hasn't been thoroughly tested.

If you have downloaded the source package, Sumatra-0.6.0.tar.gz::

    $ tar xzf Sumatra-0.6.0.tar.gz
    $ cd Sumatra-0.6.0
    # python setup.py install

The last step may have to be done as root.


Alternatively, you can install directly from the Python Package Index::

    $ pip install sumatra

or::

    $ easy_install sumatra