I have a question concerning the possibility and the utility to run R studio Desktop on a Windows server.
Here is my situation:
I work on big data projects in R and my local desktop is now clearly reaching saturation
I have a remote connexion to a Windows 12 server on which are installed 20 cores, 64 Go RAM and 4 To of storage which I would like to use to override my problem
As I understand, it is imposible to install R studio server on a windows server.
So could someone tell me if it is possible to run R studio Desktop on my windows server with the aim of taking benefit from its capacities ? And if I do that, will I have to use special R packages to use the computational power of my server?
More generally, I am not sure to understand the main purpose of R studio server: is it only to access Rstudio with a web interface or has necessarly to be installed in order to compute data from a remote server ?
R Studio Desktop works just fine on windows servers.
The disadvantage is that you have to physically log in to the server. At that point, you're not really using it like a server, but more like a really powerful desktop.
Okay, thank you for that answer!
So I have still an interrogation concerning the monitoring of computational power (use of cores and RAM) between those 2 options:
R studio Desktop installed on the windows server
R studio server on the client with a remote connection ( via a web url)
Is it exactly the same concerning that matter of computational power? I am asking this question because on R studio server homepage you can read that" R studio server scale compute and RAM centrally" Does it mean that R studio server offers like Spark a framework for distributed computation ? Or anyway , even if you are using R studio server from a remote client, do you have to use packages like sparklyr to manage your RAM and cores ?
I'm the only one at my location that uses R, and we're restricted to Windows machines only.
So I've never really had to learn anything about resource monitoring. Hopefully someone more technology oriented will come along and answer your question.
There should be no difference in terms of what resources are available to the R session whether you use RStudio Desktop or RStudio Server. That said, if you're attempting to run RStudio on a Windows machine, you're limited to RStudio Desktop as RStudio Server only runs on Linux machines.
RStudio Server Pro is useful when you have a cluster of many machines, and want to control where new R sessions are spawned (so that new R sessions can be spawned on machines with relatively lower load). However, once the R session is launched, it behaves just as it would if you had a locally running instance of RStudio Desktop.
This doesn't imply that RStudio Server will automatically distribute computations across nodes for you; rather, it can help distribute newly launched R sessions across machines so that each machine is utilized as effectively as possible.