R-Gui with remote execution?

-----Original Message-----
From: r-sig-mac-bounces at r-project.org [mailto:r-sig-mac-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of Simon
Urbanek
Sent: July-15-11 12:54 PM
To: Robert Chatfield
Cc: r-sig-mac at r-project.org
Subject: Re: [R-SIG-Mac] 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.

Not sure if this is all the support you were referring 
to, but I use Carbon Emacs from
http://homepage.mac.com/zenitani/emacs-e.html
and can invoke e.g. X11() and plot to the X11 device
(Mac OS X 10.6.7).

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