Inconsistent behavior by open mpi

Hi,

Happy New Year.

This is my first experience with MPI and I am experiencing behavior that
is not consistent (sometimes it works...)  and my debugging abilities are
exhausted. As I'm a newbie, please be patient...

1. I am using the doMPI package to communicate with the Rmpi package to
run R on NYU's HPC which uses Centos 6.3.
2. I installed my copy of R on /scrach, and I installed the doMPI and Rmpi
packages using the login node after I loaded  gcc/4.9.2 and
openmpi/intel13/1.6.5 modules. All good here.
3. The gist of the PBS file is:

module purge
module load gcc/4.9.2 openmpi/intel13/1.6.5
module list

mpirun -np 1 /scratch/ez466/R/bin/R --slave -f
/scratch/ez466/data_ces/multiple_poly_kernel.R > multiple_poly_kernel.txt

4. This job actually worked once.

5. I am trying to run the job again, almost identical R code, and it does
not survive the communication with the workers.

The errors that I get in the std error file are not consisted (as far as
I'm understanding...)

A - The first error:

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
std error:
########################################
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
_orterun has exited due to process rank 20 with PID 3753 on
node compute-19-4.local exiting improperly. There are two reasons this
could occur:

1. this process did not call "init" before exiting, but others in
the job did. This can cause a job to hang indefinitely while it waits
for all processes to call "init". By rule, if one process calls "init",
then ALL processes must call "init" prior to termination.

2. this process called "init", but exited without calling "finalize".
By rule, all processes that call "init" MUST call "finalize" prior to
exiting or it will be considered an "abnormal termination"

This may have caused other processes in the application to be
terminated by signals sent by _orterun (as reported here).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
[compute-17-6.local:09445] 58 more processes have sent help message
help-mpi-runtime.txt / mpi_init:warn-fork
[compute-17-6.local:09445] Set MCA parameter "orte_base_help_aggregate" to
0 to see all help / error messages
########################################


while the R output is:
########################################

[1] "going to load packages"
[1] "finished loading packages, now trying to get workers"
Master processor name: compute-17-6; nodename: compute-17-6.local
Size of MPI universe: 60
Spawning 59 workers using the command:
  /scratch/ez466/R/lib64/R/bin/Rscript
/scratch/ez466/R/lib64/R/library/doMPI/RMPIworker.R
WORKDIR=/scratch/ez466/logs/poly_kernel-2474551
LOGDIR=/scratch/ez466/logs/poly_kernel-2474551 MAXCORES=1 COMM=3
INTERCOMM=4 MTAG=10 WTAG=11 INCLUDEMASTER=TRUE BCAST=TRUE VERBOSE=TRUE
    59 slaves are spawned successfully. 0 failed.
########################################

So it crushed before it reached any of the R code beyond the
initialization.
I am setting the cluster with:
cl <- startMPIcluster(verbose=TRUE)
registerDoMPI(cl)


And a closer inspection of the MPI log files show that some workers print
this:
########################################
Starting MPI worker
Worker processor name: compute-19-4; nodename: compute-19-4.local
Error in if (numcores > 1) { : missing value where TRUE/FALSE needed
Calls: local -> eval.parent -> eval -> eval -> eval -> eval
Execution halted
########################################

While others print
########################################
Starting MPI worker
Worker processor name: compute-19-5; nodename: compute-19-5.local
parallel package is not being used
starting worker loop: cores = 1
waiting for a taskchunk...
########################################

B - The second error:

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

std error:
########################################
An invalid physical processor ID was returned when attempting to bind
an MPI process to a unique processor on node:

  Node: compute-14-10.local

This usually means that you requested binding to more processors than
exist (e.g., trying to bind N MPI processes to M processors, where N >
M), or that the node has an unexpectedly different topology.

Double check that you have enough unique processors for all the
MPI processes that you are launching on this host, and that all nodes
have identical topologies.

You job will now abort.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
[compute-15-3.local:11382] [[49684,0],0] ORTE_ERROR_LOG: Fatal in file
base/plm_base_receive.c at line 253
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
_orterun was unable to start the specified application as it encountered
an error:

Error name: Unknown error: 1
Node: compute-14-10.local

when attempting to start process rank 44.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
[compute-15-3.local:11383] [[49684,1],0] ORTE_ERROR_LOG: The specified
application failed to start in file dpm_orte.c at line 785
Error in mpi.comm.spawn(slave = rscript, slavearg = args, nslaves =
count,  :
  MPI_ERR_SPAWN: could not spawn processes
Calls: startMPIcluster -> mpi.comm.spawn -> .Call
Execution halted
########################################

This time R fails short of spawnning the workers
########################################
[1] "going to load packages"
[1] "finished loading packages, now trying to get workers"
Master processor name: compute-15-3; nodename: compute-15-3.local
Size of MPI universe: 60
Spawning 59 workers using the command:
  /scratch/ez466/R/lib64/R/bin/Rscript
/scratch/ez466/R/lib64/R/library/doMPI/RMPIworker.R
WORKDIR=/scratch/ez466/logs/poly_kernel-2474555
LOGDIR=/scratch/ez466/logs/poly_kernel-2474555 MAXCORES=1 COMM=3
INTERCOMM=4 MTAG=10 WTAG=11 INCLUDEMASTER=TRUE BCAST=TRUE VERBOSE=TRUE
########################################

No MPI logs are created, as expected.


Here is where I am stuck. I tried re-installing the packages and the
really inconsistent part is that sometimes it works, such as with the
example from the beginning of the e-mail.
I tried 'googling' the error, but the discussions I saw were far too
technical. The suggestion I saw was to work with openmpi 1.8.4 for better
socket detection...

Thank you for surviving this e-mail and I really appreciate your help.
Kind regards,
Elad Zippory