[R] R runs on Windows Server 2012?

[Chris Solomon]

Hi Jeff-

Thanks for your input. I will try to provide a little more detail.

First, it is useful to know that I know very little about high-performance computing with R or in general. 

We occasionally run models that take a lot of processor time. In the past I have used quad-core desktops and the foreach package to speed up the computation on parallelizable parts of these models. My goal with the sever is to be able to speed up computation some (a lot) more.

I am envisioning that we would mostly use the server as a compute node, but it seems possible that we might occasionally want to interact directly with R as installed on the server itself (including graphics) via Remote Desktop.

Really what I am looking for is for someone who has experience with R on servers, with Windows Server 2012 and maybe other operating systems, to give me some guidance on the kinds of capabilities and limitations that you lay out hypothetically - e.g. "it will work fine with WS2012 as long as you don't try to work with graphics", or "it works just as it would on Windows7", or "there are lots of issues, you may want to rethink your OS", or whatever.

Thanks
Chris



-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff Newmiller [mailto:jdnewmil at dcn.davis.CA.us] 
Sent: Friday, August 02, 2013 11:30 AM
To: Chris Solomon; r-help at r-project.org
Subject: Re: [R] R runs on Windows Server 2012?

The FAQ may seem vague to you, but your question seems vague to me. I don't run R on any Windows Server, so I cannot answer your question, but there is more than one way to run R on any server and you have not mentioned how you want it to run. For example, you might run it via Remote Terminal in "interactive" mode, in which case the video settings of the client may affect graphics functionality. Or, you may want to use it as a compute node for parallel computation, leaving graphics generation to your client node. Or, you may want to use it as a network service that generates graphics files non-interactively and serves them via a web page. I suggest you clarify your definition of "run" to prompt a more helpful response from the list.
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Sent from my phone. Please excuse my brevity.

Chris Solomon <chris.solomon at mcgill.ca> wrote:
>Hi-
>
>Can someone confirm whether R runs on the Windows Server 2012 OS, and 
>if so whether there are any significant differences from running on 
>e.g. Windows 7 that I ought to be aware of?
>
>The R for Windows FAQ (URL below) seems to indicate that running on 
>Windows Server 2012 is possible, but the text is a little vague and I 
>haven't been able to find any clear answers on the mailing list 
>archives. We are considering spending a chunk of money on a small 
>server and I want to be very sure that R will run before we do.
>
>URL for relevant FAQ:
>http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/rw-FAQ.html#How-do-I-install
>-R-for-Windows_003f
>
>Thanks
>Chris
>
>
>*****
>Dr. Chris Solomon
>Dept. of Natural Resource Sciences
>McGill University
>
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