Connect Spotfire Data Science to R Server

Applicable to Spotfire Data Science Version 5.1 to 6.0.

1) Follow these steps to install R server on a CentOS 6.5 that has Oracle JDK installed

yum install texinfo-tex
rpm -ivh http://mirror.unl.edu/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
yum install R

CentOS 7

For CentOS 7, you will need to run

yum install texinfo-tex
rpm -Uhv http://mirror.math.princeton.edu/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm
yum install R

2) Get the Alpine-r-connector and start Rserve

Download the Alpine-r-connect archive from here - https://github.com/alpinedatalabs/alpine-r/releases or copy it from CHORUS_HOME/alpine-current/r-connector/alpine-r-connector.tar location of your Spotfire Data Science instance to the R server machine. Then follow the steps from this page - R Execute Prerequisites to extract the content of that archive and start the Rserve.

3) Configure Spotfire Data Science UI

Configure the hostname and the port number of the R server from the Spotfire Data Science UI as it's described on this page - R Server Preferences and try to run the R-Execute operator.

Error Message:

If the R-Execute fails showing this error: Execution of 'R Execute' failed. Error details: Timeout waiting for reply to message GetMaxRWorkerCount. Check network Connection and R server JVM. (see the attached screenshot)

[ERROR] [03/25/2015 17:46:04.060] [rServeActorSystem-akka.actor.default-dispatcher-32] [akka://rServeActorSystem/system/endpointManager/reliableEndpointWriter-akka.tcp%3A%2F%2FclientActorSystem%4010.0.0.204%3A2602-0/endpointWriter] dropping message [class akka.actor.SelectChildName] for non-local recipient [Actor[akka.tcp://rServeActorSystem@172.16.0.15:2553/]] arriving at [akka.tcp://rServeActorSystem@172.16.0.15:2553] inbound addresses are [akka.tcp://rServeActorSystem@172.28.0.2:2553]

Potential Cause:

If you have specified a NATed IP address, there is a connectivity issue.

Potential Resolution:

In order to work around this issue, make sure that the Spotfire Data Science server can resolve the R server's hostname and configure the R server's hostname on the Spotfire Data Science UI (instead of the NAT'ed IP address) - (see the attached screenshot).

Also, change the R server's hostname in the application.conf file of the alpine-r-connector (instead of the default (hostname = ""), specify the R-server's hostname):

hostname = "host-1.skytap.example"