How do you save the state of a computation in while using SNOW (or Multicore or ...)

From hard experience I've found it useful t开发者_Python百科o occasionally save the state of my long computations to disk to start them up later if something fails. Can I do this in a distributed computation package in R (like SNOW or multicore)?

It does not seem clear how this could be done since the master is collecting things from the slaves in a non-transparent way.

This is (again :-) a hard one.

You could try to dump snapshots on the nodes using save() or save.image(). You could then try to re-organize your code so that the nodes can resume after the last snapshot.

Or you could try to re-organize your workflow such that nodes 'take tickets' and return the results. That way the central node keeps tabs on everything and you can log interim results there.

Either way, what you desire is not available out of the box (as far as I know).