Administration • hipercow

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Rebuilding the bootstrap library

Ensure that the packages have built and are on the r-universe; this might take a little while (it rebuilds once an hour). Check on the builds page to see if it has updated.

Install your own copy of hipercow as usual (you’ll need hipercow.windows and conan2 but these will be installed on use if you don’t have them already).

install.packages(
  c("hipercow", "hipercow.windows"),
  repos = c("https://mrc-ide.r-universe.dev", "https://cloud.r-project.org"))

Set your working directory to anywhere on a network share (home drives are fine for this).

Trigger building the bootstrap with:

hipercow.windows:::bootstrap_update_all()

This will update all versions on the cluster that are at most one minor version older than the most recent. It does have the side effect of changing the windows configuration for wherever you run the command to the most recent supported R version.

Testing a copy of hipercow on the cluster

If you want to test a copy of hipercow on the cluster, you need to install a specific version of it somewhere it will be picked up. The simplest way of doing this is to install everything into a new bootstrap environment.

Create a new development bootstrap library by running (as above, from a network location):

hipercow::hipercow_init(".")
hipercow::hipercow_configure("windows", r_version = "4.3.0")
hipercow.windows:::bootstrap_update(development = "mrc-4827")

Now you can use your new version, after setting the option hipercow.development = TRUE:

library(hipercow)
hipercow_init(".", "windows", r_version = "4.3.0") # needs to match above
options(hipercow.development = TRUE)
id <- task_create_expr(sessionInfo())
task_status(id)
task_log_show(id)
task_status(id)
task_result(id)

It is assumed that you have the development version installed locally yourself, which is likely the case.

Recreating the vignettes

These need to be run in a network share so set an environment variable:-

HIPERCOW_VIGNETTE_ROOT=/path/to/share

or on Windows, a mapped drive, such as

HIPERCOW_VIGNETTE_ROOT=Q:/hipercow_vignettes

in your .Renviron indicating where we should work. We’ll make lots of directories here.

Each vignette can be built by running (ideally in a fresh session with the working directory as the package root)

knitr::knit("vignettes_src/windows.Rmd", "vignettes/windows.Rmd")
knitr::knit("vignettes_src/packages.Rmd", "vignettes/packages.Rmd")
knitr::knit("vignettes_src/stan.Rmd", "vignettes/stan.Rmd")

which generates a new windows.Rmd file within vignettes/ that contains no runnable code and so can be safely run on CI.

You may want to run options(hipercow.development = TRUE) to build using the development versions (see above).

The remaining vignettes use the example driver so they can be run independent of any actual cluster.

On the command line, make vignettes will run through all vignettes, but this seems to only work on some versions of make.

Rtools, Java support and R versions (Windows)

We have batch files specific for each version of R that we support which:-

Set the path to Rscript.exe for that R version
Set the necessary environmental variables for a matching version of RTools, such as RTOOLS43_HOME and BINPREF.
Set the environment variable JAVA_HOME which the rJava package looks up.

These batch files live in \\projects.dide.ic.ac.uk\software\hpc\R, and are called things like setr64_4_3_2.bat, which looks like this.

@echo off
IF EXIST I:\rtools (set RTOOLS_DRIVE=I) else (set RTOOLS_DRIVE=T)
FOR /f %%V in (%RTOOLS_DRIVE%:\Java\latest.txt) DO set JAVA_HOME=%RTOOLS_DRIVE%:\Java\%%V
set RTOOLS43_HOME=%RTOOLS_DRIVE%:\Rtools\Rtools43
set BINPREF=%RTOOLS_DRIVE%:/Rtools/Rtools43/x86_64-w64-mingw32.static.posix/bin/
set path=%RTOOLS_DRIVE%:\Rtools\Rtools43\usr\bin;%RTOOLS_DRIVE%:\Rtools\Rtools43\x86_64-w64-mingw32.static.posix\bin;C:\Program Files\R\R-4.3.2\bin\x64;%path%

echo Using RTOOLS43_HOME = %RTOOLS43_HOME%
echo Using JAVA_HOME = %JAVA_HOME%

These get copied to C:\Windows on each cluster node, using the HPC Cluster Manager. You simply select the nodes, right click, “Run Command”, and look in the history for previous copy commands, to copy the batch files in to %SystemRoot% - hence they are always in the path on every node. You also need to edit the permissions to allow everyone to read the file, by running this on each cluster node:-

cacls %SYSTEMROOT%\setr64_*.bat /e /p everyone:r

This also needs doing (manually) on the headnode, which runs the BuildQueue.

Adding R Versions

Download the new R version into \\projects\software\hpc\R.
Copy the most recent install_r_....bat file, to a name matching the new R version. Edit it; usually just changing the R_VERSION near the top is enough.
Copy the most recent setr64_...bat file, to a name matching the new R version. Usually just the path is enough, but for major versions, we’ll need to consult the documentation and see if we need a new RTools version too.
Run the new install batch file on all cluster nodes.
On fi--didex1 edit C:\xampp\htdocs\mrcdata\hpc\api\v1\cluster_software\cluster_software.json to add the new version, and perhaps remove retired ones.

Updating RTools

This varies each time, and especially between different major R versions. But essentially:-

From any local computer, install the latest RTools into a sensible folder in I:\rtools,
where I: is the bootstrap share, \wpia-hn
The rest is done with the separate setr64_...bat files; review these for the versions that need the new RTools.

Updating Java support

This is unlikely to be needed in any urgent sense, but should you want a new or different version:
Download a JDK LTS zip file of your choice from azul.com, my favourite place for OpenJDK builds.
Unzip into I:\Java, and then rename the folder it makes it to a tidier version number, such as 21.0.2
Update I:\Java\latest.txt to contain that new version string.
JAVA_HOME will then point to the root of the Java JDK, and rJava and xlsx will work happily.

stan

See vignette("stan") for general comments about stan.

To update the installation of CmdStan on the I:/ (and generally available), run:

hipercow::hipercow_init(driver = "windows")
hipercow.windows:::cmdstan_install()

Users should not run this themselves into their home directories as the installation is about 1GB

There are influential environment variables set at the driver level which prevent stan from breaking our Rtools installation. These are

hipercow.windows:::DEFAULT_ENVVARS[c("name", "value")]

For details see: