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". 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. Regards, Murray Jorgensen -- Dr Murray Jorgensen http://www.stats.waikato.ac.nz/Staff/maj.html Department of Statistics, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand Email: maj at waikato.ac.nz Fax 7 838 4155 Phone +64 7 838 4773 wk Home +64 7 825 0441 Mobile 021 0200 8350
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". 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. Regards, Murray Jorgensen -- Dr Murray Jorgensen http://www.stats.waikato.ac.nz/Staff/maj.html Department of Statistics, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand Email: maj at waikato.ac.nz Fax 7 838 4155 Phone +64 7 838 4773 wk Home +64 7 825 0441 Mobile 021 0200 8350
On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 8:00 AM, Murray Jorgensen <maj at 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: gabraham at csse.unimelb.edu.au web: http://www.csse.unimelb.edu.au/~gabraham