Mathematica and RSH: Remote Execution under Unix

The shell command to start an interactive Mathematica kernel on a remote machine is

rsh remotehost math

where remotehost is the name of the remote machine (a fully qualified domain name if outside the local area network) and math is the command to start a Mathematica kernel. If this command is not on the search path, the full path name can be given instead.

rsh remotehost /usr/local/bin/math

It is a good idea to use the command above in a shell window to see whether everything is set up correctly before you try to use the given remote host in Parallel Computing Toolkit. If everything is fine, the remote kernel should print the familiar Null prompt. You can then use Quit to terminate the remote kernel and the connection to the remote machine.

Once RSH is working, you can use LaunchSlave to start a kernel on a remote Unix machine.

LaunchSlave["remotehost", "rsh `1` math -mathlink"]

You may have to prefix the remote kernel command math with the appropriate path name and use /usr/local/bin/math.

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