Concepts

This concepts guide is an introduction to the concepts that make Covalent unique as a workflow management system for machine learning experimentation. The guide has two parts.

The first part, Covalent Basics, introduces the key code elements that make up Covalent. These elements are the building blocks of Covalent workflows:

Covalent Basics

@electron

A task, the smallest unit of computational work in Covalent

@lattice

A workflow composed of tasks

dispatch()

A function to submit a workflow to the Covalent server

executor

A plugin to execute individual tasks

get_result()

A function to retrieve the product of a workflow

The second part, Covalent Architecture, outlines the three main parts of the Covalent architecture and introduces the in-depth descriptions that follow:

Covalent Architecture

Covalent SDK

Describes the workflow model embodied in Covalent’s API, including the Python code elements introduced in Basics.

Covalent Server

Describes in detail how the Covalent server handles workflows and dispatches tasks for execution.

Covalent GUI

Shows how the Covalent GUI displays dispatched workflows in summary and detail forms, and how it saves and retrieves results.