R or C++ on FreeNX servers - R-help

Wed, Nov 25, 2009 1:03 PM #

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

Dr Murray Jorgensen      http://www.stats.waikato.ac.nz/Staff/maj.html
Department of Statistics, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand
Email: maj at waikato.ac.nz                                Fax 7 838 4155
Phone  +64 7 838 4773 wk    Home +64 7 825 0441   Mobile 021 0200 8350

Cedrick Johnson

Wed, Nov 25, 2009 1:09 PM #

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:

Tobias Verbeke

Wed, Nov 25, 2009 1:25 PM #

Hi Murray,

Murray Jorgensen wrote:

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