miscellaneous

I recently updated my set-up, and because I use a High-Performance cluster from my University (kudos to avakas) to run various simulations and analyses, I have MPI and Rmpi installed on my laptop in order to test my scripts before submitting them to the big cluster. So I installed openmpi from homebrew very easily: brew update brew install open-mpi But then I had extensive trouble installing the Rmpi package…

I just released a new package on CRAN. It’s called NPflow, it performs Dirichlet process mixture of multivariate normal, skew-normal or skew t-distributions modeling, you should check it out. I was a little worried because the check from Travis CI was returning a NOTE. And even though the NOTEs seem like mild problems, “you should strive to eliminate all NOTEs” before submitting to CRAN ! Preparing for an email exchange with a member of the R core team, I wrote the following in the submission comments:

This is a quick technical post, that is as much about disseminating the information as putting it in a place where I can find it again in the future. I have been trying to use openMP in an R package that I am currently developing. openMP is supported by the popular gcc compiler. However, OS-X Xcode now ships with a clang compiler that does not support openMP. So first one needs to install gcc (from homebrew for instance).

At Bordeaux University, we are quite lucky. I mean as computational consumers. Indeed, we have access to a big CPU cluster, a mesocenter that has been build for all the researchers in the Aquitaine area (in the south west of France). And it’s a big one. It’s named avakas, and it has brought my Ph.D. computational projects to an other scale ! But for a few month now, I have also been granted access (for free as a I work in a national research agency) to a new kind of big computer: a net of heaters.

Yesterday I attended a conference on the Horizons of Statistics at the Henri Poincaré Institute in Paris, organized by the French Statistical Association. As it was broadcasted on youtube, this reminded me of the Future Of Statistics unconference organized by the simply statistics blog earlier in 2013 fall. By the way I really enjoyed Daniela Witten talk from this unconference: check it out ! The Horizons of Statistics turned out very interesting, and I really enjoyed Emmanuel Candès talk on randomized computing algorithms, as well as Emmanuel Todd talk which was very refreshing at the end of the day.

At ISPED, the research institute where I work, we have a weekly Ph.D. students seminar. It is an informal meeting of (more or less) all the Ph.D. students of the institute, bringing together people from epidemiology, medical informatics, biostats, etc. Each student gets 20 minutes sharp to talk either about his/her research or any article of his/her choosing (possibly a little bit outside of our respective research domains), followed by 10 minutes of questions.