From tkeitt at mail.utexas.edu  Tue Mar 23 22:08:21 2004
From: tkeitt at mail.utexas.edu (Timothy H. Keitt)
Date: Wed Mar 24 02:17:40 2004
Subject: [Rd] Distributed computing
In-Reply-To: <8565cvcqak.fsf@servant.blindglobe.net>
References: <4CFF80F2-7BE2-11D8-A658-000393CE2F0C@math.chalmers.se>
	<1080065437.40607d9d47208@webmail.mail.gatech.edu>
	<8565cvcqak.fsf@servant.blindglobe.net>
Message-ID: <1080076101.29104.17.camel@workstation-0-0>

My inclination would be to, whenever possible, replace the core scalar
libraries with compatible parallel versions (lapack -> scalapack),
rather than make it an add-on package. If the R client code is general
enough, and the make file can automatically find the parallel version,
then its a simple matter of compiling with the parallel libs. (Don't
know if this is possible at run-time.) No rewriting (high level) R code
at all. I tried to contact the plapack folks here at UT about
integrating with R, but it appears the project is no longer active.

Tim

On Tue, 2004-03-23 at 13:32, A.J. Rossini wrote:
> gte810u@mail.gatech.edu writes:
> 
> >> does anyone know if there exists an effort to bring some kind of 
> >> distributed computing to R? The most simple functionality I'm after is 
> >> to be able to explicitly perform a task on a computing server. Sorry if 
> >> this is a non-informed newbie question...
> >
> > As an alternate to the PVM/MPI interfaces mentioned by other people, I am
> > working on a (very soon to be released) project for using the ScaLAPACK library
> > [1] through a simple R interface.  If the tasks that you want run an a computing
> > server are simple (LAPACK) functions (solve, svd, etc) and not whole R scripts,
> > then this be useful.
> 
> A number of folks have commented on having this in progress (esp a
> group at Vanderbilt).  It's intriguing, but how did you plan on
> replacing the standard system-level library calls?  (or did you just
> provide new interfaces at the user (R command) level?)
> 
> best,
> -tony
-- 
Timothy H. Keitt
Section of Integrative Biology
University of Texas at Austin
http://www.keittlab.org/


[Rd] Distributed computing
Timothy H. Keitt