[R] R hangs when connected via VPN [incl. minimal example]

[Marius Hofert]

Dear Duncan,

Rich Calaway helped me narrowing down the error. The problem is that I can't execute the line
cl<- makeCluster(mpi.universe.size(), type ="MPI")
when I am connected via VPN. Rich finally suggested to post this on R-SIG-HPC, which I did a couple of minutes ago. 

Cheers,

Marius

On 2011-03-13, at 23:12 , Marius Hofert wrote:

> Dear Duncan,
> 
> thanks for your suggestion. I contacted "REvolution Computing" on this behalf. 
> Rmpi and rlecuyer are loaded automatically, so they are not explicitly needed in the minimal example. 
> I'll post the answer (if I receive one). 
> It's quite an annoying problem if you frequently work on a server.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Marius
> 
> On 2011-03-13, at 13:26 , Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> 
>> On 11-03-13 4:34 AM, Marius Hofert wrote:
>>> Dear expeRts,
>>> 
>>> This is a similar post as on R-SIG-MAC [I didn't receive an answer there; not sure if it was the right place to post either].
>>> 
>>> I'm running R version 2.12.1 (Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin9.8.0/x86_64 (64-bit))
>>> on a MacBook Pro under Mac OS X 10.6.6. The following minimal example runs fine
>>> under this setup. However, if I am connected to a server via a VPN client
>>> [Cisco AnyConnect; same with Apple's internal VPN connection], then the minimal
>>> example hangs and just does not do anything. The "red button" in the R Console
>>> is dark red [normal behavior if R is running], so R tries to do something, but
>>> cannot succeed. CPU goes up to 100%... Same happens if I start the job from the
>>> command line via R CMD BATCH. What's going on? Is this a known issue?
>>> 
>>> Cheers,
>>> 
>>> Marius
>>> 
>>> library(doSNOW)
>>> library(Rmpi)
>>> library(rlecuyer)
>>> library(foreach)
>> 
>> You're using 4 different contributed packages here. Do you really need all of those?  If so, it's going to be hard to debug.
>> 
>> I'd suggest trying to determine the last successful call, and the first unsuccessful one, then take this up with the maintainer of the package that fails.
>> 
>> Duncan Murdoch
>> 
>>> 
>>> cl<- makeCluster(mpi.universe.size(), type ="MPI")
>>> tmp<- clusterSetupRNG(cl, seed=rep(1,6))
>>> registerDoSNOW(cl)
>>> 
>>> counter<- 0
>>> res<- foreach(k = 1:1000) %do% {
>>>    counter<- counter + 1
>>> }
>>> tmp<- stopCluster(cl)
>>> 
>>> unlist(res)
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>> 
>