On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 8:00 AM, Murray Jorgensen <m...@stats.waikato.ac.nz> wrote: > Hi all, > > 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".
FreeNX is just software for connecting to a desktop remotely, like VNC (only better). So they probably have some sort of cluster. You don't need NX unless you want to run an R GUI, which is not a good idea for long running processes and unreliable network connections. Better to run it from the terminal (check out GNU screen too). > > 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. > > 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. Assuming it's a Unix/Linux cluster on standard hardware (most likely), you could just run R as normal (single threaded), or do parallel processing using packages like Rmpi, snow, multicore, etc.. If you use MPI, you'll probably need a bit of help setting it up properly. For starters, see http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/HighPerformanceComputing.html and the R-sig-hpc mailing list. -- Gad Abraham PhD Student, Dept. CSSE and NICTA The University of Melbourne Parkville 3010, Victoria, Australia email: gabra...@csse.unimelb.edu.au web: http://www.csse.unimelb.edu.au/~gabraham ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
