[R-SIG-Mac] R-Gui with remote execution?

[Simon Urbanek]

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.

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
> 
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