[R] Snow/Snowfall hangs on windows 7

[luke-tierney at uiowa.edu]

Thanks to Thomas, Steve, Uwe, and others for reporting the problem and
suggesting fixes. A new version of snow is on its way to CRAN that
hopefully fixes the problem on Windows without breaking tings
elsewhere.  I don't have access to Windows at the moment so if things
don't work and you are willing to help debug then please let me know.
I was hoping to be able to make snow robust to spaces in paths on
other platforms as well but that seems to be complicated, so for now I
signal an error on non-Windows platforms with spaces in path names
snow uses. Also, I have not tested mpi or nws back ends on Linux.
Again, if this version creates problems for you and you are willing to
help sort things out please let me know.

This release also includes some experimental performance monitoring
tools described in ?snow.time.

Best,

luke

On Mon, 16 May 2011, Uwe Ligges wrote:

> Folks,
>
> I guess I know what is going on (and why I haven't seen this so far): All of 
> you have installed R in a directory with blanks in it, right?
>
> Please source() the attached sock.R and afterwards try again. Does it work 
> with SOCK clusters now? Then it was just the lack of quotes.
>
> CCing Luke the diffs (against snow 0.3-3 on CRAN):
>
> @@ -29,8 +29,8 @@
>             env <- paste("MASTER=", master,
>                          " PORT=", port,
>                          " OUT=", outfile,
> -                         " SNOWLIB=", snowlib, sep="")
> -            cmd <- paste(rscript, script, env)
> +                         " SNOWLIB=", shQuote(snowlib), sep="")
> +            cmd <- paste(shQuote(rscript), shQuote(script), env)
>         }
>         else {
>             script <- "RunSnowWorker RSOCKnode.R"
> @@ -43,13 +43,13 @@
>     else {
>         if (homogeneous) {
>             scriptdir <- getClusterOption("scriptdir", options)
> -            script <- file.path(scriptdir, "RSOCKnode.sh")
> +            script <- shQuote(file.path(scriptdir, "RSOCKnode.sh"))
>             rlibs <- paste(getClusterOption("rlibs", options), collapse = 
> ":")
>             rprog <- getClusterOption("rprog", options)
>             env <- paste("MASTER=", master,
>                          " PORT=", port,
>                          " OUT=", outfile,
> -                         " RPROG=", rprog,
> +                         " RPROG=", shQuote(rprog),
>                          " R_LIBS=", rlibs, sep="")
>         }
>         else {
>
>
> (same problem in mpi.R, nws.R etc. as well, I think)
>
> Best wishes,
> Uwe
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On 16.05.2011 00:01, David Anisman wrote:
>> Same problem as Anna here.
>> 
>> Windows 7 64-bit. Running R 2.13.0. snow + snowfall installed.
>> 
>> Testing:
>> 
>> library(snow)
>> library(snowfall)
>> 
>> sfInit(parallel=TRUE, cpus=2, type="SOCK")
>> 
>> Then R spins forever (yes, I disabled the Windows firewall).
>> 
>> On the same box, tried the same on Ubuntu under Virtualbox. No problem. 
>> Runs
>> well.
>> 
>> Any suggestions/ideas appreciated.
>> 
>> 
>> David
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> --
>> View this message in context: 
>> http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/Snow-Snowfall-hangs-on-windows-7-tp3436724p3524990.html
>> Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>> 
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
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>> PLEASE do read the posting guide 
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>

-- 
Luke Tierney
Statistics and Actuarial Science
Ralph E. Wareham Professor of Mathematical Sciences
University of Iowa                  Phone:             319-335-3386
Department of Statistics and        Fax:               319-335-3017
    Actuarial Science
241 Schaeffer Hall                  email:      luke at stat.uiowa.edu
Iowa City, IA 52242                 WWW:  http://www.stat.uiowa.edu