Dear Vadim, On 2/14/07, Vadim Ogranovich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi, > > I have few high-level questions about the Snow and Rmpi packages . I > understand that Snow uses Rmpi as one of possible transport layers, yet my > questions about user experience, not technical details: > > 1. Does Snow install and work well in Windows? > 2. Interruptibility. I understand that currently it is impossible to > interrupt a running top-level command in Snow ( Ctl-c or the likes), the only > way to kill slave processes is to kill the master R process. Is this > accurate? What about Rmpi ? Is there any difference between Windows and Linux?
I've never used any of those under Windoze. I think your statement is accurate under Linux. (In fact, I often get rid of any of those Rmpis gone astray by issuing a lamhalt and/or lamwipe). > 3. When the master process dies , is it guaranteed that the slaves will die > too? How reliable is this (I've seen some applications, not related to R, > that were flaky about killing slaves) If you use an orderly exit procedure (mpi.close.Rslaves(); mpi.quit()) I've never, ever, seen badly behaved Rmpi slaves. But I've seen them under strange circumstances (I think network problems that messed up the lam universe ?). A kind of fail proof approach, if you can afford it, is to use different lam universes (using the LAM_MPI_SESSION_SUFFIX) for different simultaneous runs. Then, if one particular run behaves poorly, you can issue a lamhalt/lamwipe for just that LAM universe. A final suggestion: you might want to take a look at the papply package, which does load-balancing and allows you to run sequential (if there is no lam universe), and thus makes debugging much simpler. R. > > Thank you very much for your help, > Vadim > > > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > ______________________________________________ > [email protected] mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. > -- Ramon Diaz-Uriarte Statistical Computing Team Structural Biology and Biocomputing Programme Spanish National Cancer Centre (CNIO) http://ligarto.org/rdiaz ______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
