[R] Rserve and R to R communication

[Matthew Keller]

Hi Ramon,

I've been interested in responses to your question. I have what I
think is a similar issue - I have a very large simulation script and
would like to be able to modularize it by having a main script that
calls lots of subscripts - but I haven't done that yet because the
only way I could think to do it was to call a subscript, have it run,
save the objects from the subscript, and then call those objects back
into the main script, which seems like a very slow and onerous way to
do it.

Would Rserve do what I'm looking for?

On 4/7/07, Ramon Diaz-Uriarte <rdiaz02 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> The "clients.txt" file of the latest Rserve package, by Simon Urbanek,
> says, regarding its R client,
>
> "(...) a simple R client, i.e. it allows you to connect to Rserve from
> R itself. It is very simple and limited,  because Rserve was not
> primarily meant for R-to-R communication (there are better ways to do
> that), but it is useful for quick interactive connection to an Rserve
> farm."
>
> Which are those better ways to do it? I am thinking about using Rserve
> to have an R process send jobs to a bunch of Rserves in different
> machines. It is like what we could do with Rmpi (or pvm), but without
> the MPI layer. Therefore, presumably it'd be easier to deal with
> network problems, machine's failures, using checkpoints, etc. (i.e.,
> to try to get better fault tolerance).
>
> It seems that Rserve would provide the basic infrastructure for doing
> that and saves me from reinventing the wheel of using sockets, etc,
> directly from R.
>
> However, Simon's comment about better ways of R-to-R communication
> made me wonder if this idea really makes sense. What is the catch?
> Have other people tried similar approaches?
>
> Thanks,
>
> R.
>
> --
> Ramon Diaz-Uriarte
> Statistical Computing Team
> Structural Biology and Biocomputing Programme
> Spanish National Cancer Centre (CNIO)
> http://ligarto.org/rdiaz
>
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-- 
Matthew C Keller
Postdoctoral Fellow
Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics