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

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).

No. I was talking about the inverse - i.e. emacs that can run on X11 so you can tunnel it through SSH since Bob will be running emacs on the remote machine, not the local one. You can't tunnel Cocoa/Carbon so Carbon Emacs is useless for that purpose (unless it's compiled with X11 support besides Carbon...).