A typical scenario in which the Tool Set for Computational Experiments might be of great use is that we have a program that performs certain experiments and we want to be able to repeat or at least recapitulate later (possibly after several years) how these experiments were done.
Generally, the following two steps are necessary to make an experiment
reproducible.
The easiest way to do this is to use the Tool Set for Computational Experiments in combination with a version
control system
such as the Concurrent Version System (CVS) (available at http://www.cvshome.org/).
Using CVS enables us to restore all source files of a particular experiment
if we know, for example, the date on which the experiment was run.
The bookkeeping mechanisms provided by the tool set (in particular, the
program labrun) record the dates of experiments as well as many other
relevant environmental data, which allows one later to rerun the
experiment (provided that the same environment, i.e., machine, compiler, etc.,
is still available). Rerunning is easily accomplished using the labrerun tool.