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Error: ReadItem: unknown type 98, perhaps written by later version of R

Aldi Kraja 
Thanks to Martin who send an email off the list with among others the 
following:

"Probably the file is being corrupted on disk, perhaps it has not yet 
been closed before reading is attempted, or some other obscure file 
system issue. Probably the key part in your script is 'sleep', which 
probably slows disk access enough for your file system to recover 
integrity."

His note made me think that something can be with the programs running 
in parallel in the same processing server:

There are up to 8 slots for running in parallel 8 jobs in a Linux 
server. Many servers are available.
Each job is working with unique file names for R and the corresponding 
out files, and also all the objects inside the each R job are defined 
unique with their own indices, and I finish the program with q(); n for 
not saving the R space at the end of each process.

Let me draw a parallel thinking with SAS jobs. If I run a 8 parallel job 
in SAS, SAS although it will use the /tmp directory of that processing 
server, each job will have its own pid and they are built unique in 
their run and uniquely saving temp data and removed at the end. So 8 
parallel jobs in a server and  more from different servers, they do not 
corrupt each others data.

Now what happens with R? Eight jobs are in parallel, are they processed 
in unique spaces of the /tmp harddrive, or all write to ~/.RData ? If 
the last happens although they are uniquely defined, it is quite 
possible that in the ~/.RData something is happening with reported error:

Error: ReadItem: unknown type 98, perhaps written by later version of R
Execution halted

Probably --no-restore --no-save may help, but isn't that dangerous if 
all programs (if I have 1000 of them) write all to ~/.RData? So how R 
handles parallel jobs of the same user in regard to the R invocation and 
space used for temporary calculations. Do these parallel batch R jobs 
see each other in the same space or are they for sure in independent 
temporary subdirs?

Thanks,

Aldi
On 8/22/2012 3:47 PM, Aldi Kraja wrote:

Thread (4 messages)

Aldi Kraja Error: ReadItem: unknown type 98, perhaps written by later version of R Aug 21 Aldi Kraja Error: ReadItem: unknown type 98, perhaps written by later version of R Aug 22 Aldi Kraja Error: ReadItem: unknown type 98, perhaps written by later version of R Aug 23 Martin Morgan Error: ReadItem: unknown type 98, perhaps written by later version of R Aug 23