Simon's Blog

After 2.5 hours I have finally managed to get Rmpi installed and working on Arch.

After lots of trying and searching I finally found out that Rmpi is not compatible with the latest version of openmpi which is installed from the Arch repos (version 1.5.3-2). Following the recommendation here I was able to get Rmpi working by reverting to openmpi version 1.4.3, which is in fact the current release.

To do this, I downloaded openmpi 1.4.3 from the Open MPI download page, extracted the tarball, compiled and installed the source in the usual way:

./configure
make
make install


After installation I then followed the directions here with modifications to account for the new install location. Specifically, I ran the command:

sudo ldconfig /usr/local/lib/openmpi/

and then added the line:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib/openmpi/:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

to my .bashrc file.

Finally, I was able to install Rmpi in R using the following command:

install.packages("Rmpi",
configure.args =
c("--with-Rmpi-include=/usr/local/include/",
"--with-Rmpi-libpath=/usr/local/lib/openmpi/",
"--with-Rmpi-type=OPENMPI"))


I have now test Rmpi by running the script I posted previously after opening R as:

/usr/local/bin/mpirun -np 1 R --vanilla

and it all seems to work as expected. Phew!