How do I launch a SmartSim orchestrator without models?

Question

I'm trying to prototype using the SmartRedis Python client to interact with the SmartSim Orchestrator. Is it possible to launch the orchestrator without any other models in the experiment? If so, what would be the best way to do so?

Answer 1

It is entirely possible to do that. A SmartSim Experiment can contain different types of 'entities' including Models, Ensembles (i.e. groups of Models), and Orchestrator (i.e. the Redis-backed database). None of these entities, however, are 'required' to be in the Experiment.

Here's a short script that creates an experiment which includes only a database.

from SmartSim import Experiment
NUM_DB_NODES = 3
exp = Experiment("Database Only")
db = exp.create_database(db_nodes=NUM_DB_NODES)
exp.generate(db)
exp.start(db) 

After this, the Orchestrator (with the number of shards specified by NUM_DB_NODES) will have been spunup. You can then connect the Python client using the following line:

client = smartredis.Client(db.get_address()[0],NUM_DB_NODES>1)