I have set up a Microsoft HPC 2008 cluster using the instructions at: DIY Supercomputing: How to Build a Small Windows HPC Cluster
I want to make use of this cluster to run R jobs
I have been trying to find out how to do that, and so far have only found some relevant information here: "Revolution R Enterprise for Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 gives customers an extremely powerful tool that handles analysis of very large data and high workloads."
Further, Revolution Analytics has a free version, and a paid version
My questions are:
- Do you know if the free version of their package would let me utilise the full resources in the cluster while running jobs using doParallel, parallel and foreach? (I have already written to their sales guy and asked it; awaiting response)
- If not, do you know of any "free way" in which I can utilise my cluster resources from within R?
Also some more background information:
In past, I have struggled and failed to set up a R cluster using regular Windows machines (not the HPC server 2008) using the following 3 methods:
- Using SOCK in SNOW package: Could not set up passwordless SSH, and not sure if it would work even after I am able to set that up (as here: SOCK Cluster is difficult to set up on Windows)
- Using doRedis package: I faced problem as described here: doRedis on Windows 7 gives error as soon as foreach loop is run
Using Microsoft MPI: mpiexec fails with the error message (I could not find resolution to this error message)
"Error in mpi.setup.rngstream: There is no slave or only one slave"
Please help!
