[Rd] Snow on Windows Cluster

[Luke Tierney]

Thanks for the note.

Could you give me more info on the "small failures on stopping cluster"?

I don't currently have a windows system I can test this on so I can't
fold it into the snow release yet. But hopefully I can in the next
month or so. I may get back in touch at that point.

Meanwhile I have been working with a modified shell script that can be
used with mpirun under lam on unix.  I've attached the current
version.  It may turn out that this approach is a little more
maitainable on the Windows side as well.  The way this gets used is

     mpirun -np 5 RMPISNOW

to run a master and 4 workers, and then in the master

     cl <- getMPIcluster()

instead of using makeCluster or makeMPIcluster.  I have not yet found
the MICH2 analog of the LAMRANK environment variable but suspect
something similar does exist.

Best,

luke


On Mon, 3 Sep 2007, Markus Schmidberger wrote:

> Hello,
>
> the package snow is not working on a windows cluster with MPICH2 and Rmpi. 
> There is an error in makeCluster:
>
> launch failed: CreateProcess(/usr/bin/env 
> "RPROG="C:\Programme\R\R-2.5.1\bin\R" "OUT=/dev/null" "R_LIBS=" 
> C:/Programme/R/R-2.5.1/library/snow/RMPInode.sh) on 'cl1' failed, error 3 - 
> Das System kann den angegbenen Pfad nicht finden.
>
> I looked into makeMPIcluster. It could not work, mpi.comm.spawn gets the 
> shell command for unix to start the slaves. A simple solution is to use the 
> windows-code from mpi.spawn.rslaves, then it looks like this. And is working 
> on our windows-cluster. (small failures on stopping cluster)
>
> # Fro windows
> if (.Platform$OS=="windows"){
>   workdrive <- unlist(strsplit(getwd(),":"))[1]
>   tmpdrive <- unlist(strsplit(tempdir(),":"))[1]
>   worktmp <- as.logical(toupper(workdrive)==toupper(tmpdrive))
>   tmpdir <- unlist(strsplit(tempdir(),"/Rtmp"))[1]
>   localhost <- Sys.getenv("COMPUTERNAME")
>   networkdrive <-.Call("RegQuery", 
> as.integer(2),paste("NETWORK\\",workdrive,sep=""),
>                      PACKAGE="Rmpi")
>   remotepath <-networkdrive[which(networkdrive=="RemotePath")+1]
>   mapdrive=TRUE
>   mapdrive <- as.logical(mapdrive && !is.null(remotepath))
>   Rscript=system.file("slaveload.R", package="snow")
>   arg <- c(Rscript, R.home(), workdrive, getwd(),worktmp, tmpdir,
>                  localhost, mapdrive, remotepath)
>           #Rscript,R_HOME,WDrive,WDir,WorkTmp,TmpDir,Master,MapDrive,RemotePath
>   print("super")
>   count<-mpi.comm.spawn(
>       slave=system.file("Rslaves.bat", package="Rmpi"),
>       slavearg=arg,
>       nslaves=count)
> } else{   # for unix
>   count <- mpi.comm.spawn(slave = "/usr/bin/env",
>                               slavearg = args,
>                               nslaves = count,
>                               intercomm = intercomm)
> }
>
> Doing some work, there should be a better and nicer solution with directly 
> using mpi.spawn.Rslaves.
>
> Best
> Markus
>
>

-- 
Luke Tierney
Chair, Statistics and Actuarial Science
Ralph E. Wareham Professor of Mathematical Sciences
University of Iowa                  Phone:             319-335-3386
Department of Statistics and        Fax:               319-335-3017
    Actuarial Science
241 Schaeffer Hall                  email:      luke at stat.uiowa.edu
Iowa City, IA 52242                 WWW:  http://www.stat.uiowa.edu
-------------- next part --------------
#! /bin/sh

# if definded, prepend R_SNOW_LIB to $_LIBS
if test ! -z "${R_SNOW_LIB}" ; then
    R_LIBS=${R_SNOW_LIB}:${R_LIBS}; export R_LIBS
fi

# find the library containing the snow package; should eventually use Rscript
snowdir=`echo 'invisible(cat(tryCatch(dirname(.find.package("snow")), error = function(e) ""),"\n",sep=""))' | R --slave`

# for now this hijack the R_PROFILE mechanism to start up the R
# sessions and load snow and Rmpi into them
R_PROFILE=${snowdir}/snow/RMPISNOWprofile; export R_PROFILE

if test -z "${LAMRANK}" ; then
    echo "not using LAM-MPI; currently only LAM-MPI is supported"
    exit 1
else 
    # use the LAMRANK environment variable set by LAM-MPI's mpirun to
    # run R with appropriate arguments for master and workers.
    if test "${LAMRANK}" == "0" ; then
	exec R $*
    else
	exec R --slave > /dev/null 2>&1
    fi
fi