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snow clusters on Windows

2 messages · Noah Charney, Guy Yollin

Original
Noah Charney
# 
R-HPC list members,

I am wondering if anyone could help us with the setup for snow clusters on
windows machines.  Is there something specific we need to do to set up SSH
so that R can access it in the absence of linux?  We are working on
Windows Server 2003, and on Vista, the problem is the same on both.  We
can create local clusters using the name "localhost" on any computer, but
no other name/IP address we substitute for "localhost" works.  Example
code is below.

#This works fine
[[1]]
$con
    description           class            mode            text         
opened
"<-Poopy:10187"      "sockconn"           "a+b"        "binary"       
"opened"
       can read       can write
          "yes"           "yes"
$host
[1] "localhost"
attr(,"class")
[1] "SOCKnode"
attr(,"class")
[1] "SOCKcluster" "cluster"
#But if we try to call the home computer by name or IP address, or
anything else, it doesn't work...
#It just hangs there until we hit 'escape', at which point it says:
Warning message:
In system(cmd, wait = FALSE, input = "") : ssh not found


Thanks
-Noah Charney
---
Organismic and Evolutionary Biology
University of Massachusetts Amherst
221 Morrill Science Center South
Amherst, MA 01003-9297
Guy Yollin
# 
Hi Noah,

While I did not use snow, I was able to sucessfully implement cluster computing with windows workstations using NetWorkSpaces:
http://nws-r.sourceforge.net/

As you noted the key to these solutions is to get SSH running on windows boxes which can be accomplished with Cygwin 
http://www.cygwin.com/

The biggest challenge was configuring SSH and here are some links that I had found helpful back when I was setting this up:

http://www1.umn.edu/oit/prod/groups/oit/@pub/@oit/@web/@security/documents/asset/oit_asset_001221.pdf

http://lifehacker.com/205090/geek-to-live--set-up-a-personal-home-ssh-server

http://www.bmonday.com/articles/653.aspx

Good Luck!

Best,

-- Guy


-----Original Message-----
From: r-sig-hpc-bounces at r-project.org [mailto:r-sig-hpc-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of Noah Charney
Sent: Monday, January 18, 2010 11:59 AM
To: r-sig-hpc at r-project.org
Subject: [R-sig-hpc] snow clusters on Windows

R-HPC list members,

I am wondering if anyone could help us with the setup for snow clusters on
windows machines.  Is there something specific we need to do to set up SSH
so that R can access it in the absence of linux?  We are working on
Windows Server 2003, and on Vista, the problem is the same on both.  We
can create local clusters using the name "localhost" on any computer, but
no other name/IP address we substitute for "localhost" works.  Example
code is below.

#This works fine
[[1]]
$con
    description           class            mode            text         
opened
"<-Poopy:10187"      "sockconn"           "a+b"        "binary"       
"opened"
       can read       can write
          "yes"           "yes"
$host
[1] "localhost"
attr(,"class")
[1] "SOCKnode"
attr(,"class")
[1] "SOCKcluster" "cluster"
#But if we try to call the home computer by name or IP address, or
anything else, it doesn't work...
#It just hangs there until we hit 'escape', at which point it says:
Warning message:
In system(cmd, wait = FALSE, input = "") : ssh not found


Thanks
-Noah Charney
---
Organismic and Evolutionary Biology
University of Massachusetts Amherst
221 Morrill Science Center South
Amherst, MA 01003-9297

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