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[Bioc-devel] reporting progress while running in parallel

4 messages · Robert Castelo, Martin Morgan, Ralf Tautenhahn

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dear developers,

i'm adding parallel support to my package by copying & pasting the way
in which this is done by other packages like ShortRead. i'm currently
using 'snow' and since i'm providing this support for
computing-intensive calculations i'd like that while these calculations
are running in parallel, some sort of progress is reported.

i'd like to ask whether anybody here has added parallel support to
his/her package including some sort of progress reporting functionality.

my first guess is that probably the loop of slave R processes created by
'snow' should be replaced by something else, but i hope somebody has a
more clear idea about what could be done.


thanks!
robert.
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On 08/27/2010 07:27 AM, Robert Castelo wrote:
Hi Robert --

I don't have a solution, but if I were starting on this with snow I'd
look at clusterApplyLB and dynamicClusterApply -- break the overall set
of tasks into a number of jobs > the number of nodes, and then in a loop
like that in dynamicClusterApply report to the user as each job comes
back from recvOneResult.

In Rmpi a fun project might be to figure out how to use a separate comm
to send errors.

Martin

  
    
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XCMS has slightly modified versions of snow's clusterApply(LB)
that allow progress reporting.

Regards,
Ralf.

schrieb Robert Castelo:
2 days later
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Ralf, thanks for the hint, i've looked at the current devel code and
over the original snow code of staticClusterApply() it just adds a
message to inform that a job is being sent to a slave. however, as i was
saying in a previous message to Martin, i'm not interested in reporting
when a job starts and ends but how far are the slaves in their
respective jobs. again, if you or anybody has ever seen something like
this in an R or BioC package, i'll be very happy to hear about it.

cheers,
robert.
On Sat, 2010-08-28 at 03:41 -0700, Ralf Tautenhahn wrote: