[R] R on Beowulf cluster?

[Barry Rowlingson]

Liaw, Andy wrote:

> Thanks for the reply.  I'm aware of almost all of those things you
> mentioned, and have played with some of them.  I'm not looking to do
> distributed computing within R at this point.  What I'm after, though, is
> not really addressed by any of them.  I want a user to be able to start an
> interactive R session on a compute node that the system determines
> (dynamically) to be most available at the time.  That's what `beorun' does,
> but I couldn't get it to run R interactively.
> 

  As an alternative suggestion, have you thought of using OpenMOSIX 
instead of your Beowulf tools? With an OpenMOSIX cluster your process 
runs on whichever processor is best for it, and jumps around as CPU 
availability within the cluster changes. If you've got a cluster with 
slow and fast processors, jobs will run on the fast processors first, no 
matter where the user is logged in.

  You can also add machines to the cluster without having to install 
software on them - system calls are made back on the initial machine so 
the process always sees the files it had there. Its like plugging in a 
new CPU.

  We've been running an OpenMOSIX cluster for a few years now, and apart 
from the odd problem, it works really well. Older versions of R had 
trouble migrating, but anything above 1.7 quickly finds itself a nice 
zippy host and uses that.

  Note this is x86 processor only, since it's a set of patches to the 
linux kernel.

Baz