[R] Rserve and R to R communication

[Gregory Warnes]

You may find it easier to use NetWorkSpaces for R (see http://nws- 
r.sourceforge.net/), which provides a simple mechanism for sending  
tasks to "worker" R processes and collect the results back when done.

-G

On Apr 9, 2007, at 12:08PM , Matthew Keller wrote:

> 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
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting- 
>> guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>
>
>
> -- 
> Matthew C Keller
> Postdoctoral Fellow
> Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting- 
> guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.