[R] Status of Rmpi--Good with tweaks

[Ross Boylan]

I have some more good news and some questions.

On Tue, 2004-03-23 at 20:50, Hao Yu wrote:
> Sorry. I have not been able to update Rmpi since the version
> 0.4-4 on R site. 
I don't think any version of Rmpi is on the R site at the moment.

Minor aside: Also, it would be nice if the packages starting with "R"
were consistent about whether it's "R" or "r."  Rmpi but rpvm is a
little dissonant.  Unfortunately, there seems to be no agreement.

> 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'm happy to report the Rmpi 0.4-7 installs and works without a problem
(or any necessary modification) on my Debian mostly testing system (it
does have some unstable stuff, but in particular it has the older
lam/mpi 6.5.8-2.  version 7 has been held in unstable for 60 days
because of some problems on alpha hardware).

Note this is not quite the lam in the current stable Debian distro,
which is at 6.5.6-6.
> 
> 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.
Great.  Thanks.  I think it would be well worth making 0.4-7 available
at http://www.stats.uwo.ca/faculty/yu/Rmpi/.  I'll send you, off list,
the hacks I made to get the thing (starting with 0.4-6) to compile with
the MPI 1.2ish mpich.  It didn't run, but at least it did compile and
load at the end.

By the way, I'm in the dark about (r)sprng.  From some of the snow docs,
I thought that was really snow's business.  But your site notes that the
Rmpi packages are withough SPRNG support.  And Tony Rossini's pages (I
think) had a slightly cryptic remark that SPRNG under MPI was a bit
dicey.
> 
> 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.
I don't completely follow that, since I don't control whether or not
native MPI calls are used, as far as I know.  Do you mean that Rmpi can
be used alone OK, but if you use snow (or, I guess Rmpi calls oriented
toward snow and the transmission of R objects) it will need the
serialize facility (prior to R 1.8)?