[R] R or C++ on FreeNX servers

[Tobias Verbeke]

Hi Murray,

Murray Jorgensen wrote:

> 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.

As far as I know FreeNX is an implementation of a protocol that
allows to connect to remote X sessions (X being the standard
windowing system for *nix systems) in an optimized way.

There is (in my understanding) no relationship to parallel algorithm
execution. Using a NX client, you can connect to a remote (often
more powerful) machine (potentially making use of multiple cores on
that machine in a parallel way), but the FreeNX part of it is just
about having the remote machine's GUI forwarded such that you can
work "on the server" (in a window on) on your desktop machine.

HTH,
Tobias

> 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
>