[R] Rserve and R to R communication

[Ramon Diaz-Uriarte]

On 4/9/07, Paul Gilbert <pgilbert at bank-banque-canada.ca> wrote:
> Matthew Keller wrote:
> > Hi Ramon,
> >
> > I've been interested in responses to your question. I have what I
> > think is a similar issue - I have a very large simulation script and
> > would like to be able to modularize it by having a main script that
> > calls lots of subscripts -
> For simulations you need to worry about the random number generator
> sequence.  I think snow has a scheme for handling this. If you devise
> your own system then be sure to look after this (non-trivial) detail.
>

Aaaargh, you are right, of course. Rmpi does have it too. I'll recheck
the rlecuyer and rsprng  packages (both can be used from Rmpi and,
IIRC, from snow).

Thanks for pointing this out!

Best,

R.




> Paul Gilbert
> > but I haven't done that yet because the
> > only way I could think to do it was to call a subscript, have it run,
> > save the objects from the subscript, and then call those objects back
> > into the main script, which seems like a very slow and onerous way to
> > do it.
> >
> > Would Rserve do what I'm looking for?
> >
> > On 4/7/07, Ramon Diaz-Uriarte <rdiaz02 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Dear All,
> >>
> >> The "clients.txt" file of the latest Rserve package, by Simon Urbanek,
> >> says, regarding its R client,
> >>
> >> "(...) a simple R client, i.e. it allows you to connect to Rserve from
> >> R itself. It is very simple and limited,  because Rserve was not
> >> primarily meant for R-to-R communication (there are better ways to do
> >> that), but it is useful for quick interactive connection to an Rserve
> >> farm."
> >>
> >> Which are those better ways to do it? I am thinking about using Rserve
> >> to have an R process send jobs to a bunch of Rserves in different
> >> machines. It is like what we could do with Rmpi (or pvm), but without
> >> the MPI layer. Therefore, presumably it'd be easier to deal with
> >> network problems, machine's failures, using checkpoints, etc. (i.e.,
> >> to try to get better fault tolerance).
> >>
> >> It seems that Rserve would provide the basic infrastructure for doing
> >> that and saves me from reinventing the wheel of using sockets, etc,
> >> directly from R.
> >>
> >> However, Simon's comment about better ways of R-to-R communication
> >> made me wonder if this idea really makes sense. What is the catch?
> >> Have other people tried similar approaches?
> >>
> >> Thanks,
> >>
> >> R.
> >>
> >> --
> >> Ramon Diaz-Uriarte
> >> Statistical Computing Team
> >> Structural Biology and Biocomputing Programme
> >> Spanish National Cancer Centre (CNIO)
> >> http://ligarto.org/rdiaz
> >>
> >> ______________________________________________
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> >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> >> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> >> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
> >
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-- 
Ramon Diaz-Uriarte
Statistical Computing Team
Structural Biology and Biocomputing Programme
Spanish National Cancer Centre (CNIO)
http://ligarto.org/rdiaz