Message-ID: <4B0DA0B1.60208@openanalytics.be>
Date: 2009-11-25T21:25:05Z
From: Tobias Verbeke
Subject: R or C++ on FreeNX servers
In-Reply-To: <4B0D9BAC.7010800@waikato.ac.nz>
Hi Murray,
Murray Jorgensen wrote:
> 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.
As far as I know FreeNX is an implementation of a protocol that
allows to connect to remote X sessions (X being the standard
windowing system for *nix systems) in an optimized way.
There is (in my understanding) no relationship to parallel algorithm
execution. Using a NX client, you can connect to a remote (often
more powerful) machine (potentially making use of multiple cores on
that machine in a parallel way), but the FreeNX part of it is just
about having the remote machine's GUI forwarded such that you can
work "on the server" (in a window on) on your desktop machine.
HTH,
Tobias
> 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
>