HEAL Infrastructure Development Tasks

This page contains a list of several tasks which aim at improving HEAL's software and hardware infrastructure. Especially those tasks are managed in this list, which can hardly be done within the scope of regular research projects.

Every HEAL member is invited to add additional tasks under "New" and to contribute to these tasks.

Currently in Progress

Task	Team	Description	Started	Progress
New Persistence	gkronber, jkarder	Implement a new persistence layer based on Google ProtoBuf. #2520	2017	90%
Hive Project Management	jzenisek, jkarder	Hive jobs should be assigned to projects to protocol HPC infrastructure usage. #2839	2017	90%
oVirt Migration	swagner, jkarder	Change virtualization layer on HPC hosts to oVirt.	2018	80%
Problem refactoring	abeham, mkommend	Unify HeuristicOptimizationProblem and BasicProblem hierarchies #2521	2015

Pending

Task	Reporter	Priority	Description

New

Task	Reporter	Description	Votes
.NET Standard Migration	swagner	We should switch from .NET Framework to .NET Core to enable HL on platforms other than Windows (at least for the non-GUI parts). Therefore, we need to migrate as many HL assemblies to .NET Standard as possible.	3
HL & Chocolatey	swagner	Provide Chocolatey packages for HL and HiveDrone to enable easier deployment and installation.	0
Explore GUI Alternatives	swagner	WinForms is outdated and already quite old. We should think about a new HL GUI. Ideally, it should also support platforms other than Windows. Therefore, we should explore alternative platform-independent GUI frameworks.	0
Hive Budgets	swagner	Hive should offer the functionality to assign a compute budget to a user/project/etc.	0
Automate Deployment of Hive VMs	swagner	Maybe we can automate deployment of Hive VMs using Terraform or any other deployment automation solution.	0
Hive & Docker	swagner	Hive jobs should be executed in Docker containers in order to gain more flexibility and security.	0
Source Code Migration to Git	swagner	We should use Git instead of SVN, as SVN is loosing its importance and Git is better suited for open-source projects.	3
Upgrade builder	swagner	The builder.heuristiclab.com server is still Windows Server 2008 R2. It should be reinstalled with Windows Server 2016.	0
Use GitLab CI instead of TeamCity	swagner	If we migrate to Git and host HL on GitLab, we should try to use GitLab CI instead of TeamCity to reduce the number of different tools we use.	0
Restructure Plugins	swagner	HL consists of too many plugins. We should merge several plugins together to reduce the number of assemblies drastically.	3
New Algorithm Model	swagner	The operator graph algorithm model has not been very successful in the end. We should rethink HL's algorithm model.	1
Pull GUI Updates instead of push	swagner	Currently GUI updates are pushed by firing events in an algorithm. However, it would be a better idea to pull new data from the GUI instead as this should reduce the overhead for GUI updates significantly.	0
Rename HiveSlave to HiveDrone	swagner	Following the analogy of a bee hive, Hive slaves should be named Hive drones instead. (gkronber: I like HiveWorker better)	0
HL Usage Survey	swagner	A usage survey could be integrated in HL (e.g., on the start page) to ask users about their application scenarios and most desired and most disliked features of HL, etc.	0
Telemetry Data	swagner	It would be very interesting to get some telemetry data from HL, so that we can get some information, which algorithms/problems/features of HL are frequently used.	0
Change Hive WCF Services to REST Services	swagner	Instead of WCF services Hive should use REST services.	0
HL Web App	swagner	Think about which functionality would be reasonable in the HL Web App and how it could be improved.	0
irace	swagner	Integrate irace into HL.	1
OKB Agents	swagner	Implement agents that identify interesting test configuration for OKB automatically.	0
Search Visualization Showcase	swagner	Think about a possible showcase to visualize the search process of a heuristic algorithm with VR technology (together with Anthes/Jetter).	0
Reports for Experiment Analysis	swagner	Automatically generated reports might help to make analysis of large experiments easier.	0
Unit Tests	swagner	Implement more unit tests and improve coverage of automated tests.	0
Projects / Workspaces	swagner	Some kind of projects or workspaces in HL would be nice to organize one's work.	0
Parameter Validation	swagner	Parameters set by users in the GUI should be validated.	0
Simplify Release Process	abeham	The release process currently takes several hours. It should take only a couple of minutes.	1

Deferred

Task	Reporter	Description

Done

Task	Team	Description	Finished