launching remote kernel

I am trying to extend my parallel computation abilities by adding some remote kernels to my current laptop kernels (just 2 cores).

First of all let me ask what are you experience with doing this, is the thing really giving a boost to your computation?

I have some little experience with my two local cores and sometimes it actually reduced the computation time of a factor two, using ParallelTable, but at other times, it was ten times slower!

I have found out how to connect to the remote machine and start a kernel via command line with one simple ssh command of the type

ssh user@host mathematicacommand


This also works with the SSH implementation by Wolfram

java -jar /Applications/Mathematica.app/SystemFiles/Java/WolframSSH.jar user@host mathematicacommand


Now I have tried to use the remote kernel configuration on Mathematica, but the standard config seems not to work, so I wanted to do something that works by giving command on the Mathematica frontend to launch these remote kernel.

I have seen some examples for this, such as this, but they are not terribly applicable to my case.So, let me ask you guys for a series of commands I can issue on the Mathematica frontend to launch remote kernels by hand.

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Which operating system are you running on your laptop, and what is running on the remote machine? –  Oleksandr R. Jul 5 at 14:15
Hi, sorry that I forgot to mention that, my laptop is Mac OS X 10.8 and the remote machine is Linux. I hope this info can help. –  Roberto Franceschini Jul 6 at 23:18