[R-sig-hpc] Can't start multi node SNOW cluster

[Stephen Weston]

On Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 11:19 AM, Xiaobo Gu <guxiaobo1982 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>I think you should use something like:
>
>>    cl <- makeCluster(lapply(1:2, function(i) winOptions), type =
>>"SOCK", manual=TRUE)
>
>>To allow options to be passed in with the host names, you need to
>>specify a list of lists.  Using "c(rep(winOptions, 2))" concatenates winOptions
>>to itself which makes snow think that you're passing in a simple lists of
>>hostnames.
> Thanks, that works, but snow still can't start remote workers automatically.

I thought that you had already figured out that the problem was
not having sshd's running on your Windows cluster.

With snow, I believe you have three options for running on multiple
nodes:

1) Use a socket cluster which depends on ssh/sshd;
2) Use an MPI cluster which depends on an MPI installation that
works with Rmpi;
3) Use manual mode which obviously isn't automatic.

I thought that some people have managed to use snow on clusters,
at least using MPI, but I don't really use Windows, so I can't really
help there.

- Steve