Status of Rmpi--Good with tweaks

Sorry. I have not been able to update Rmpi since the version
0.4-4 on R site. However, I have been using and testing Rmpi
internally since 0.4-4. Now it is version 0.4-7. See the
attached package. It requires R 1.8.1 (no more serialize
package requirement) and works with the newest MPI-LAM
versions 7. It will configure automatically if a rpm package
from www.lam-mpi.org is used. I tested it on both Redhat 9
and Debian. At least it passed the package check without any
warning on Redhat 9. Now the problem is that it may have
some problems with the default lam coming with Debian
system. This is the reason why I hesitate to release it to
R. 

I am also working on it to see if #ifdef can be used to work
MPI 1.2 specs other than LAM-MPI. 
Hopefully in a couple of months, I am able to submit a
stable version to R.

Regards,

Hao 

PS: Rmpi should still work without serializing as long as
native MPI calls are used. The serializing is mainly used to
help moving an arbitrarily R object around.

Ross Boylan wrote:

On Tue, 2004-03-23 at 18:26, Ross Boylan wrote:

On Tue, 2004-03-23 at 17:35, Luke Tierney wrote:

The serialize package should no longer be needed since the
functionality is now in R itself.  I haven't run snow with a new
version of Rmpi newer than 0.4-4; with that version things worked on
my systems the last time I tried.  We need to revize the paper you
cite; when we get to that we'll hopefully have a chance to give a
newer version of Rmpi a go.

Best,

luke

I got 0.4-6 to work, with one tweak to eliminate the loading of
serialize and one fix of my own setup.

I changed the .First.Lib code in Rmpi to be
    if (!exists("serialize") && !require(serialize))
      stop("serialize package cannot be loaded. Exit")

!exists("serialize") && is new.  This is effort to check if the

                                          ^an

serialize function exists (R 1.8) and skip loading the library in that
case.  Since there are various ways this might be fooled, perhaps an
explicit check of the R version would be better.

I'm also not sure if the R packaging mechanism makes this easy, or

"this" refers to the modification to the .First.Lib that I made.

autogenerates it.  This is a bit of a tricky situation, since serialize
is required for some versions of R but should not be used for the most
recent.

I suspect that without this the cluster would not come up because Rmpi
would not load properly.  I have not tested that.