[R] snow/Rmpi without MPI.spawn?

[Jim Leek]

I'm a programmer at a high-performance computing center.  I'm not very
familiar with R, but I have used MPI from C, C++, and Python.  I have to run
an R code provided by a guy who knows R, but not MPI.  So, this fellow used
the R snow library to parallelize his R code (theoretically, I'm not
actually sure what he did.)  I need to get this code running on our
machines.

However, Rmpi and snow seem to require mpi spawn, which our computing center
doesn't support.  I even tried building Rmpi with MPICH1 instead of 2,
because Rmpi has that option, but it still tries to use spawn.

I can launch plenty of processes, but I have to launch them all at once at
the beginning. Is there any way to convince Rmpi to just use those processes
rather than trying to spawn its own?  I haven't found any documentation on
this issue, although I would've thought it would be quite common.

Thanks,
Jim