To install QuantLab and quantlib on the APAI VM, you will first need to increase its storage. This guide is written in the hypothesis that you are using VirtualBox to run your VM.

• Execute VirtualBox, but do not boot the APAI VM.
• Enter the File menu from VirtualBox's menu bar, and select the Virtual Media Manager option.
• In the newly-opened window, select the pulp_box_2021_dory-disk1.vdi item (i.e., the APAI VM image) and use the slider to increase its size from 20GB to 32GB; we found that 32GB are sufficient to run the exercise.
• Confirm the change by clicking the Apply button, then Close the window.

An alternative using the command line can be found here.

• Boot the APAI VM.
• Once you have entered the user session on the VM, open a terminal emulator and install GParted by issuing sudo apt install gparted.
• Open the start menu and look for GParted using the search bar; execute the program.
• Select the swap partition and right-click on it; switch off memory swapping by selecting Swapoff.
• Select the extended partition and right-click on it; select Resize and move its right edge to the extreme right edge of the depicted VM storage peripheral.
• Select the swap partition and right-click on it; select Move and drag it to the right-most edge of the enclosing partition.
• Select the extended partition and right-click on it; select Resize and shrink it by moving its left edge as far right as you can.
• Select the swap partition and right-click on it; switch on memory swapping by selecting Swapon.
• Select the ext4 partition and right-click on it; select Resize and move its right edge as far right as you can.
• Enter the Edit menu from GParted's menu bar and select Apply All Operations.

More information here.

Anaconda is a distribution of the Python and R programming languages. Anaconda collects many versions of the language interpreters and numerous packages, and enables the creation of self-contained virtual environments that avoid version conflicts and facilitate experiment replication. Therefore, Anaconda is particularly useful for scientific computing.

When you install Anaconda on your machine, it creates a local index containing many commonly-used packages. Therefore, it has considerable storage requirements, a fact that might not be desirable if you plan to save storage. For this reason, the creators of Anaconda developed a lightweight version of the distribution called Miniconda. Miniconda's local index is minimal: most of the packages that you will need to create your environments will be downloaded following a lazy policy, i.e., just when you will need them.

To install Miniconda, you need to take the following steps:

• download the installer for your OS from the Miniconda installation page; we suggest that you follow the good practice of computing its digital siganture and comparing it with the one reported on the website; for example, on Linux you would run shasum -a 256 ~/Downloads/[installer_file] (supposing that you downloaded the installer to the ~/Downloads folder);
• execute the installer; for example, in a session of the BASH interpreter you would execute bash ~/Downloads/[installer_file].

QuantLab and quantlib are available on the GitHub page of the PULP project. You can obtain a copy by issuing the following commands:

$ cd ~
$ git clone https://github.com/pulp-platform/quantlab.git
$ cd quantlab
$ git submodule update --init

Then, install their dependencies by creating a dedicated Anaconda environment:

$ conda env create -f quantlab.yml
$ conda activate quantlab
(quantlab) $ cd quantlib
(quantlab) $ python setup.py install
(quantlab) $ conda deactivate

Clone a copy of this repository:

$ cd ~
$ git clone https://github.com/EEESlab/APAI-LAB03-QuantLab.git

You are now ready to go through the notebook. Enjoy!

$ conda activate quantlab
(quantlab) $ cd APAI-LAB03-QuantLab
(quantlab) $ jupyter notebook APAI-LAB03-QuantLab.ipynb