R or C++ on FreeNX servers
All FreeNX allows you to do is access a regular linux machine using X over SSH as opposed to ssh'ing in, redirecting the X-display back to your local machine (running a xserver locally).. You can install R on the machine(s) just as you would normally, and if the machines are in some sort of clustered environment, you could setup the packages specifically available on linux for R to do that (snow, multicore, etc...) Check out FreeNX here http://freenx.berlios.de/ hth -c
Murray Jorgensen wrote:
Hi all, I have just found out that the machine learning group in our Faculty has a lot of spare capacity on their FreeNX servers. I do not know a lot about these beasts but I understand that they are a free version of something produced by a firm called "NoMachine". They are designed for executing parallel algorithms and I thought that they might be of use in a project of mine comparing different model-fitting algorithms from the point of view of sensitivity to starting values. Anyway before revealing my near-total ignorance to my computer science colleagues I thought I would ask if any of my fellow R users have any experience with these things and possibly advice to offer. The CS people are probably using the servers in conjunction with Java or C++ and I could possibly use the latter of these. I wondered, though, if R could be used directly with such hardware and if so, how the parallelizing would be handled. Regards, Murray Jorgensen