[R] Status of Rmpi

[Ross Boylan]

Rmpi is not currently available on CRAN, and I don't think it has been
for a few months.  It is available at
http://www.stats.uwo.ca/faculty/yu/Rmpi/

Does anyone know its current status?

A few months ago I corresponded with the author, who noted some build
problems (specifically on Debian) were the hang up, and seemed to be
working on it.  I wasn't able to get it to work then (on a Debian
GNU/Linux testing system).  After having tried unsuccessfully to get it
working last week on an oddball system, I tried again on my system.

I was able to build the thing, but not actually get it working.  The two
obvious difficulties were that, first, I had to manually load the
serialize library (which now conflicts with the name of something in the
base package) and, second, that whenever I say makeCluster or
makeMPIcluster the thing just hangs up.  I've tried various permutations
of running or not running lamboot first.

I am able to to lamboot and lamexec, and I also tried setting LAMRSH to
use ssh on the master.  My "network" is just my dual-CPU machine.

Tony Rossini's notes
(http://www.analytics.washington.edu/~rossini/courses/cph-statcomp/cph-4.pdf) refer to SNOW and rpvm as being "currently maintained" (last page), which hints that Rmpi might not be.

I'm kind of interested in getting Rmpi to work (I and others here have
been using Rmpi), though I suppose we could switch to rpvm, so I'll
probably keep fiddling with it.  I'm using LAM 6.5.8-2.

Footnote: Does anyone know if the serialize that comes with R 1.8.1 is
compatible with the serialize package?  Should the latter be
unnecessary?
-- 
Ross Boylan                                      wk:  (415) 502-4031
530 Parnassus Avenue (Library) rm 115-4          ross at biostat.ucsf.edu
Dept of Epidemiology and Biostatistics           fax: (415) 476-9856
University of California, San Francisco
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