R: How to get a stack trace from the snow package

Question

How can I get a stack trace back from a snow node after an error occurs? I'm getting errors when I use parSapply that do not occur when I use sapply. Snow is nice enough to give me the error message but it would be much more useful for me to have the kind of stack trace you can get from traceback(). So far I have tried:

options(showWarnCalls = T, showErrorCalls = T)
setDefaultClusterOptions(outfile = "/dev/tty")

and

options(error=traceback)
setDefaultClusterOptions(outfile = "/dev/tty")

without luck. I'm currently just testing with a local cluster ie:

makeSOCKcluster(c("localhost","localhost"))

but I will eventually be using an MPI cluster. Thanks.

Relevant versions:

• snow package (version 0.3-3)
• R 2.10.1
• Mac OS X 10.5.8

Edit: moved version info to bottom of question and added OS X

Answer 1

For me, simple options(error=traceback) works, snow just captures the error message with traceback from slave and shows it on the master's output.