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I'm interested in experimenting with writing R code on my laptop which I then execute on an Amazon S3 machine. I want the execution to be interactive because I'm building a work flow and the data is only on my EC2 instance, not on my local machine.

I could redirect X11 to put the remove ESS window on my local machine, but I've had some latency issues with that. What I would like to do is just have ESS send the execute command to the remote machine.

In Googling around I found a very interesting blog post that seems to do exactly this including redirecting graphical output to my local machine. Anyone had experience with this type of work flow on Amazon EC2 and have any tips/tricks/advice?

Dirk Eddelbuettel
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JD Long
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2 Answers2

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The ESS manual talks about connecting to remote R instances, not dissimilar to what the excellent tramp mode does (where you can open files via the /user@some.machine.com:/path/file.txt generalization of /path/to/file.txt using the wonders of ssh and scp).

I have not done that. What I do a lot, though, is to start Emacs in daemon mode:

$ emacs --daemon

and to then connect via

$ emacsclient -nw    # tty, works great for `screen` over `ssh`

or if I have the bandwidth

$ emacsclient -c     # graphical via x11

The ueber-neat thing now is that Emacs keeps running, so if I start R via M-x R, that very R process also keeps running ... and I can disconnect and reconnect at will. Very powerful. You could do that on your main worker session in the cloud.

It should be possible to combine that with the remote invocation but for that we may have to ask on the ESS list for real advice.

Dirk Eddelbuettel
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  • That's good advice! After I get a 'straw man' work flow cobbled together I'll go over to the ESS list and propose it and ask for input. – JD Long Oct 05 '10 at 20:10
  • could you give a rough idea of what kind of connectivity allows to use emacsclient with X11 without too much pain and suffering (like you open a menu, count to one and you can see the menu)? I can do reasonably complicated graphics in R over 100KB/s upstream 600KB/s downstream link, 50ms ping, but emacs is absolutely lethargic. – piccolbo Mar 11 '11 at 20:50
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Check out cloudnumbers.com, I think they're doing what you need (R machine clusters, VNC in the browser)

Mark22
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