R-Gui with remote execution?

On Jul 15, 2011, at 3:20 PM, Robert Chatfield wrote:

We have three Macs, one with considerably more storage and 
processor power.  Storage requirements are probably most
important to us.

Is there a way to run R-Gui on one mac but have the
execution on a remote mac?  (I know that voluminous
graphics are probably best transmitted using pdf files or
the like.)

Currently, no. The closest you can get is to use Remote Desktop.

However, I have a situation here where we have very powerful Linux servers (hundreds of cores, TB of RAM) yet I want to use the convenience of my Mac and Quartz. To achieve that I'm working on a Mac GUI that can connect to any remote instance of R running on an arbitrary machine. The idea is that you need only a single stream (e.g. ssh) to talk to R and yet have console, graphics and everything on the Mac side. Another side-effect is that you can connect and disconnect without losing the session. The project (RemoteR) is far from complete (I still need to tie-in Quartz) but if anyone becomes excited it's available on RForge.net: http://svn.rforge.net/osx/trunk/RemoteR

If not, is there a favorite way to run remotely using X11
better than the paste-from-editor command-line interface?

I suppose most people use emacs + ESS so you don't need to copy/paste ;) -- I'm not sure whether Apple emacs supports X11, you may have to compile it from sources.

Cheers,
Simon

I also use Vim-R myself, so there may be a way to exploit
vim.

(I've checked for messages on the subject for the last few
years.)

Running R version 2.10.1 on 10.6.7 locally and 10.5.8 remotely.

regards,  Bob Chatfield
NASA Ames Research Center