[R-sig-hpc] snow job

[Stephen Weston]

Luke Tierney just released snow 0.3-5 to CRAN which should fix this
problem.  If you're using snow on Windows, I recommend that you
upgrade to this new version to avoid problems with R 2.13.0.

- Steve


On Sat, May 14, 2011 at 11:33 PM, Whit Broach <whitneybroach at gmail.com> wrote:
> Problem successfully addressed!
>
> To summarize what happened off-list, I used Stephen's suggestions to isolate
> the problem.  The space in the folder name "Program Files" prevented snow
> from working correctly.
>
> Removing R, then installing under C:/R solved the problem.
>
> Useful in problem isolation was this script code from Stephen:
>
>     > snowlib <- file.path(R.home(), "library")
>     > cl <- makeSOCKcluster(2, snowlib=snowlib, outfile="")
>
> If makeSOCKcluster returns, try:
>
>     > clusterApply(cl, 1:4, sqrt)
>
> And this code was also helpful:
>
>    > library(snow)
>    > .path.package('snow')
>    > .libPaths()
>    > cl <- makeSOCKcluster(2, outfile="", manual=TRUE)
>
> Thanks to everyone who responded.
>
> Best regards,
> Whit
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Stephen Weston [mailto:stephen.b.weston at gmail.com]
> Sent: Friday, May 13, 2011 9:38 AM
> To: whitneybroach at gmail.com
> Cc: r-sig-hpc at r-project.org
> Subject: Re: [R-sig-hpc] snow job
>
> On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 5:03 PM, Whit Broach <whitneybroach at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> 4.  Steve's suggestion below, using manual = TRUE and typing the command
>> indicated.
>>
>> 4 Result.  Log file is created and not accessible until the R Gui is
> closed.
>> Then the log file opens and is empty.
>
> So you attempted to create a two-worker cluster, manually started two
> workers, and then what happened?  Did everyone hang without displaying
> any error message?
>
> Since you're running everything on one machine, I would set outfile to
> "" (the empty string).  That causes all messages to go to the console,
> which is convenient in manual mode, and prevents the two workers from
> opening and writing to the same file, which could cause problems.
> Create the cluster like this:
>
>    cl <- makeSOCKcluster(2, outfile="", manual=TRUE)
>
> Then, start the two workers in two separate command windows as before.
>
> In many cases, makeSOCKcluster will never display the command to start
> the second worker, because it hangs trying to connect to the first
> worker.  So it's very important to describe exactly what happens.  In
> this case, it should display one command, wait for you to execute it,
> display a second command, wait again, and then return to the prompt.  If
> makeSOCKcluster returns to the Rgui prompt without an error, you're
> probably good to go.  But if it hangs, then knowing precisely when it
> hangs is important for guessing what went wrong.
>
> Note that only the call to makeSOCKcluster in Rgui should return.  The
> workers should not return until you shutdown the cluster using
> stopCluster in Rgui.  The workers need to keep running so they can
> execute tasks for the master.  It is a failure for one of the workers
> that you started to return to the command prompt before the cluster is
> shutdown.
>
> - Steve
>
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