[R] Condor and R

[Michael Redmond]

David,

We have discussed proposing a joint project with the UW-Madison Condor 
group to develop capabilities in Condor and R that would allow a subset 
of batch applications of R to run in the Condor standard universe. To 
this point, we have not identified a funding source to support the 
development, so the project is on hold.

I am interested in identifying the potential impact of this type of 
development as justification in our proposal. If it would affect a large 
community of R users, there would be a better possibility to find the 
needed funding.

If there is a community of R users out there that would be interested in 
having R run in Condor standard universe, please direct comments my way 
and, based on interest, I will try to move the proposal forward.

Thanks
Mike Redmond
Director of Computing Services
Dept. of Statistics, UW-Madison
---
Douglas Bates wrote:
> On 1/24/06, David Reitter <david.reitter at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>>Hi,
>>I was wondering if anyone has successfully linked R against the
>>Condor libraries so that R can be run as a Condor job in the
>>"standard" (not "vanilla") universe. The advantage of this would be
>>that due to checkpointing, jobs can be suspended and transferred to
>>another node. There is a good overview by Xianhong Xie here:
>>
>>http://cran.r-project.org/doc/Rnews/Rnews_2005-2.pdf
>>
>>Unfortunately, the article points out that some restrictions of
>>Condor preclude us from running R in the standard universe. Does
>>anyone know if this can be overcome?
> 
> 
> I don't think it can currently be overcome and this is not likely to
> change soon.  Condor doesn't like dynamic linking and loading for
> programs in the standard universe and R more-or-less requires that. 
> We reached the conclusion that changing either system to be compatible
> with the other would require a lot of work.
> 
> Mike Redmond <redmond at stat.wisc.edu> may have more current information
> about the possibility of running R in the standard Condor universe.