[R-sig-hpc] Problems Installing Rmpi - What Worked - What Didn't Work

[Rick Bilonick]

Short answer: If it doesn't matter which Linux distro you use, install
Ubuntu 9.04 64-bit and install R and openmpi from the repositories. Then
install Rmpi 0.5-7 from CRAN using "install.packages("Rmpi")".

Thanks to everyone, especially Dirk, Hao, and Brian who offered a lot of
good suggestions and in depth technical advice on getting a working
version of Rmpi.

What didn't work: I originally tried to use openmpi and  Rmpi on CentOS
5.3 on a 64-bit Opteron dual quad core processor machine. I was able to
get openmpi working but I could never get Rmpi to compile - even when
using the "R CMD INSTALL" with configuration options. The configure file
generated a compiler command with "mpi.h" appended to the path of an -I
option but only the path was wanted. (I tried my best to rework
configure.ac but to no avail.) I also tried to get lam and Rmpi working
on a Fedora 10 64-bit dual Opteron processor computer. lam installed and
ran OK, but again I could not get Rmpi to compile. It could find lam,
but had the same problem with "mpi.h" being appended to the path. I
could not deduce where this was happening nor fix it.

What did work - eventually: I installed Ubuntu 9.04 (64-bit desktop) to
the dual quad core Opteron machine. After upgrading everything, I
installed R and openmpi from the repositories using synaptic. I then did
a "sudo R" and simply used "install.packages("Rmpi")". This brought in
the latest version of Rmpi (0.5-7) and compiled it. I was able to load
Rmpi using "library" and run some Rmpi examples. (Actually, I first
installed R-cran-rmpi 0.5-6 from the repositories but this - as I
quickly found out - has a known bug (discovered and fixed by Dirk) and
causes a segmentation fault when you try to load Rmpi. Rmpi from CRAN
has Rmpi version 0.5-7 which avoids this problem.) Given that the main
use of this computer is to run R in parallel, installing Ubuntu onto a
working CentOS machine wasn't too big of an issue (assuming it
eventually worked!).

I spent a good week (or more) getting this to work. I learned a lot but
it was time well spent. I have a lot more to learn about using Rmpi. It
would be great, however, if Rmpi installed easily on Fedora and CentOS.

Rick B.