[Rd] Snow or alternative MPI packages on Windows

[giuseppe1.milicia at hsbcib.com]

:)

Actually it turns out that DeinoMPI & Rmpi & the new version of snow do the
trick.

Jay Emerson suggested NetWorkSpaces which looks quite neat. For the time
being I'll probably stick to snow/Rmpi though.

So it seems that progress has been made!

// Giuseppe



                                                                           
             Jeffrey Horner                                                
             <jeff.horner at vand                                             
             erbilt.edu>                                                To 
                                       Giuseppe1 MILICIA/IBEU/HSBC at HSBC    
             17/07/2008 16:44                                           cc 
             Mail Size: 5648           r-devel at r-project.org               
                                                                   Subject 
                                       Re: [Rd] Snow or alternative MPI    
                                       packages on Windows                 
                                                                    Entity 
                                       Investment Banking Europe - IBEU    
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           




giuseppe1.milicia at hsbcib.com wrote on 07/16/2008 08:52 AM:
> Guys,
>
> I'm running R on both Windows & Linux. I'm looking at a number of
packages
> for parallel execution. It seems that the most used packages are "snow"
and
> "Rmpi".
>
> snow seems more user friendly, but it doesn't run on windows. I see from
> searching the mailing list that I'm not the first one to try it on
Windows.
> There was a message that kind of shed some hope on the subject, but
nothing
> else.
>
> Rmpi works well on windows (with DeinoMPI) but it's kind of low level, so
> before I embark in writing code similar to snow to have some high level
> constructs I though I'd ask here about other peoples experiences...
>
> Is anyone around here doing parallel R on Windows? If so could you share
> your experience?

I remember working with Jack Dongarra's group back in the late '90's
when Microsoft donated some money, hardware, and software to ensure that
pvm, scalapack, and the like worked on Windows. My particular task was
to port Atlas to Windows and benchmark installs with various compilers
and commercial BLAS libraries. it was a total PITA, dealing with calling
conventions between fortran and C/C++, and DLL hell.

Anyway, the main researcher involved in the parallel Windows work
realized (obviously) the hard problem was remotely connecting to Windows
machines and spawning tasks, so he spent the majority of his time
writing an rsh daemon, and it became kind of a stink because he went on
to commercialize his work, buying the domain name myrshdaemon.com, and
selling it. No one ever knew how much money he made.

Point being, around ten years have passed and including Windows in a
parallel setup is still a problem?!? Sheesh!

Jeff
--
http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/JeffreyHorner



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