[R] Status of Rmpi--Good with tweaks

[Luke Tierney]

Thanks--I'll try this new version when I get back to working on
this--hopefully soon.

luke

On Tue, 23 Mar 2004, Hao Yu wrote:

> Sorry. I have not been able to update Rmpi since the version
> 0.4-4 on R site. However, I have been using and testing Rmpi
> internally since 0.4-4. Now it is version 0.4-7. See the
> attached package. It requires R 1.8.1 (no more serialize
> package requirement) and works with the newest MPI-LAM
> versions 7. It will configure automatically if a rpm package
> from www.lam-mpi.org is used. I tested it on both Redhat 9
> and Debian. At least it passed the package check without any
> warning on Redhat 9. Now the problem is that it may have
> some problems with the default lam coming with Debian
> system. This is the reason why I hesitate to release it to
> R. 
> 
> I am also working on it to see if #ifdef can be used to work
> MPI 1.2 specs other than LAM-MPI. 
> Hopefully in a couple of months, I am able to submit a
> stable version to R.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Hao 
> 
> PS: Rmpi should still work without serializing as long as
> native MPI calls are used. The serializing is mainly used to
> help moving an arbitrarily R object around.
> 
> Ross Boylan wrote:
> > 
> > On Tue, 2004-03-23 at 18:26, Ross Boylan wrote:
> > > On Tue, 2004-03-23 at 17:35, Luke Tierney wrote:
> > > > 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
> > >
> > > I got 0.4-6 to work, with one tweak to eliminate the loading of
> > > serialize and one fix of my own setup.
> > >
> > > I changed the .First.Lib code in Rmpi to be
> > >     if (!exists("serialize") && !require(serialize))
> > >       stop("serialize package cannot be loaded. Exit")
> > >
> > > !exists("serialize") && is new.  This is effort to check if the
> >                                           ^an
> > > serialize function exists (R 1.8) and skip loading the library in that
> > > case.  Since there are various ways this might be fooled, perhaps an
> > > explicit check of the R version would be better.
> > >
> > > I'm also not sure if the R packaging mechanism makes this easy, or
> > "this" refers to the modification to the .First.Lib that I made.
> > > autogenerates it.  This is a bit of a tricky situation, since serialize
> > > is required for some versions of R but should not be used for the most
> > > recent.
> > >
> > > I suspect that without this the cluster would not come up because Rmpi
> > > would not load properly.  I have not tested that.
> 
> 

-- 
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