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R-Gui with remote execution?

5 messages · Robert Chatfield, Simon Urbanek, Greg Finak +1 more

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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.)

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

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

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

            
BTW: pdf is exactly the wrong way to do that ;)

Also I forgot to mention that there are some GUI projects that separate the UI and the R process. Byron Ellis had some UI a while ago that was Mac specific so presumably could be used across Mac machines. RStudio also separates R and the UI so presumably you could run it across machines (also it ships bitmap files instead of graphics so it should be efficient) - but I have never tried it that way.

Cheers,
Simon
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There is also Rstudio that can be run either in server mode, or over an X windows connection. It will run an embedded instance of R and provides a window for graphics, a console, and a widow for editing. It's another decent alternative.

Greg Finak

Sent from my iPhone
On 2011-07-15, at 12:54 PM, "Simon Urbanek" <simon.urbanek at r-project.org> wrote:

            
1 day later
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Just to elaborate on the RStudio a bit more ... I actually don't use
it, but it sounds like it really provides what you are after.

Look at the "RStudio Server" section in the docs here:
http://rstudio.org/docs/

R will be running on a remote machine (presumably your
?ber-high-horsepower mac), and the clients will connect to it using
their browser, and the interface (I think) is quite similar to the
"normal" RStudio one running on your own machine.

Also, people are running rstudio on large EC2 instances with success
as well, for example:

http://inundata.org/2011/03/30/r-ec2-rstudio-server/

Hope that helps,
-steve
On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 3:59 PM, Finak, Greg <gfinak at fhcrc.org> wrote: