[R-SIG-Mac] R plus Xgrid?

[Simon Urbanek]

On Jun 30, 2004, at 8:08 PM, Jake Bowers wrote:

> I'm wondering if anyone has tried to/used R with Xgrid. If so, I'd be
> interested to hear any tips anyone might have about making this work
> (using either clusters of OS X machines or clusters of 
> Linux/Solaris/OS X
> machines).

We had a brief look at Xgrid, however at that time the only 
well-supported way of using it was the parallel execution of processes 
- i.e. you define you input data for each machine and run a process on 
each. Xgrid takes care of the distribution of files and collecting 
results. However this doesn't help in our case since we need the 
machines to talk to each other. I couldn't find any sufficient 
documentation on other methods supported by Xgrid.

We use the (very nice) "snow" package by Luke Tierney with PVM (via 
Rpvm) as backend. It works fine in our setting, but of course 
integration in Xgrid would be great. The future Xgrids are supposed to 
have some MPI support, but we didn't test it here - anyone out there 
tried that?

Cheers,
Simon

---
Simon Urbanek
Department of computer oriented statistics and data analysis
University of Augsburg
Universitätsstr. 14
86135 Augsburg
Germany

Tel: +49-821-598-2236
Fax: +49-821-598-2200

Simon.Urbanek at Math.Uni-Augsburg.de
http://simon.urbanek.info