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R or C++ on FreeNX servers

2 messages · Murray Jorgensen, Gad Abraham

Murray Jorgensen
# 
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
Gad Abraham
# 
On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 8:00 AM, Murray Jorgensen
<maj at stats.waikato.ac.nz> wrote:
FreeNX is just software for connecting to a desktop remotely, like VNC
(only better). So they probably have some sort of cluster. You don't
need NX unless you want to run an R GUI, which is not a good idea for
long running processes and unreliable network connections. Better to
run it from the terminal (check out GNU screen too).
Assuming it's a Unix/Linux cluster on standard hardware (most likely),
you could just run R as normal (single threaded), or do parallel
processing using packages like Rmpi, snow, multicore, etc.. If you use
MPI, you'll probably need a bit of help setting it up properly.

For starters, see
http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/HighPerformanceComputing.html and
the R-sig-hpc mailing list.