[R] how to save an R object to a remote computer

[Molly Davies]

Thank you for the suggestions! I'm actually running simulations in R over two separate networks (and thus will need to smile sweetly (and authentically, of course!) twice). In one, I am ssh-ing from my Mac laptop into one Mac machine with 32 cpu. In the other, I am ssh-ing into a cluster and am executing my simulation scripts via qsub. 

I will take a look at SSHFS!

-Molly


On Oct 23, 2011, at 12:03 PM, Barry wrote:

> On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 7:46 PM, Molly wrote:
>> Hello,
>> 
>> I am running R remotely on my university's network from my laptop (Macbook Pro, running leopard, in case this is useful). I have a strict limit on how much disk space I can take up on my network account at school, which is insufficient for the size of some of the objects I need to create. Is there any way to use save() and write.table() in R to export directly to a remote machine (in this case that would be my laptop, which has plenty of room)? I need to save vectors of lists of lists (output from mclapply). So far, my search has led me to various database utilities. I suppose I could try to make that work, but I've no experience with databases and am unsure if that is the best way for me to go.
>> Any advice (including search terms I might not have thought of yet) would be much appreciated.
> 
> The easiest way would be to do this at the operating system level -
> not using R. Some kind of shared file system between the computers.
> How are you running R remotely? What OS is the remote machine? Are you
> using connecting to a Windows machine via RDP (Remote Desktop) or a
> Linux box with SSH or something else?
> 
> With RDP its possible to tell the remote desktop program to mount
> local drives (such as hard disks or USB drives) as extra drives on the
> remote windows box (so you see extra K:,J: etc drives). Then you'd
> just get R to write to K:\something\ and its going straight on your
> laptop.
> 
> For a remote Linux machine you might be able to use SSHFS to create a
> connection to your laptop from the server.
> 
> However these things will probably rely on things being installed on
> the server and possibly friendly network technicians. Sometimes the
> real easiest solution involves smiling sweetly to the people who
> control the disk space, and if that doesn't work get your supervisor
> to try it...
> 
> I'll just check you're not one of our students...
> 
> Barry