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
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