[R] Status of Rmpi

[Luke Tierney]

The serialize package should no longer be needed since the
functionality is now in R itself.  I haven't run snow with a new
version of Rmpi newer than 0.4-4; with that version things worked on
my systems the last time I tried.  We need to revize the paper you
cite; when we get to that we'll hopefully have a chance to give a
newer version of Rmpi a go.

Best,

luke

On Tue, 23 Mar 2004, Ross Boylan wrote:

> 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?
> 

-- 
Luke Tierney
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