YouShare

AVIDA Service

Michael Weeks — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 13:14:46 +0000

Another new service for the artificial life community is the Avida service. This service is based on the Avida scientific software package, that allows a user to experiment with populations of actively evolving computer programs.

The input to the service is a zipped or tgzed archive file, consisting of avida configuration files in the root folder of the archive. These configuration files must contain the file avida.cfg.

The output of the service is an archive file consisting of the avida output folder, in tgz format. A log file is also produced.

To find the service on the YouShare portal, search for avida in the service search box. Some examples for execution are available from the run examples panel.

The service uses version Avida 2.12.4. More information on Avida can be found at http://avida.devosoft.org/

Royal Society Publication: e-Science – Towards the Cloud: Infrastructures, Applications and Research

Michael Weeks — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 12:05:05 +0000

Royal Society Publishing has just published e-Science – towards the cloud:infrastructures, applications and research, compiled and edited by Paul Townend, Jie Xu and Jim Austin.

This content can be accessed at:http://bit.ly/TA1983

A print version is also available at the special price of £35.00. You can order online via the above web page (enter special code TA 1983 when prompted)

Alternatively, you can contact debbie.vaughan@royalsociety.org

Tierra Service

Michael Weeks — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 13:37:13 +0000

The Tierra artificial life simulator has been added to YouShare as a service.

Tierra is a computer simulation developed by ecologist Thomas S. Ray in the early 1990s in which computer programs compete for central processing unit (CPU) time and access to main memory. In this context, the computer programs in Tierra are considered to be evolvable and can mutate, self-replicate and recombine.

The service is based upon Tierra version 6_02, with the patch from Matthias Rav (http://tierra.lolwh.at/) and is implemented on CentOS5 Linux.

The service takes a zipped (.zip, .tgz, .tar.gz) folder as its input. This input folder should contain:

a “soup” config file, specifying a subfolder where the remaining input files can be found
a subfolder containing;

an opcode file (e.g. “opcode.map” from the tierra installation)
genome files for all genomes listed at the end of the “soup” file

The output from the service is a tgz’ed folder containing the “standard” tierra outputs.

The service does some checking that the input folder contains valid data. If not, the service will fail, giving the reason in the resulting log file.