Remote kernels, Neural Networks and formatting of Dynamic content

Bug fixed in 11.2

I have a few GPU/CPU 'loaded' Linux boxes in my lab, used largely for rendering. I want to compare the new 11.1 Neural Network stuff to some Tensorflow things we do here. Of course, since I have all that iron back there I want to use it.

I don't want to have to actually walk all that way, and besides, they are headless (or head-impaired).

I haven't tried using remote kernels for anything other than Parallel stuff in quite a while (like, 1990 or so, with a Cray). I've noticed that the 'Basic' settings in Evaluation->Kernel Configuration Options ... don't work so I had to go and manually get a connection to happen, thanks to this answer I was able to cobble something together that works.

Except -

Things that contain Dynamic content aren't happy. To wit, here's an example, first evaluated on the Local machine, then evaluated on the remote -

The resulting NetChain isn't formatted when returning from the remote kernel. The error -

A GridBox with an invalid first argument was encountered. The first argument to GridBox must be a rectangular matrix (nested list).


makes a little bit of sense, spelunking the thing returned -

DynamicBox[GridBox[{{
NeuralNetworksPrivateNetChainMouseClickBoxes[...


suggests to me that there are things that don't get faithfully interpreted by the front-end's kernel when they come back from the remote.

This wouldn't be a problem, other than I would like to run the learning remotely and observe the progress on the front end. This is further reinforced to me by the fact that, if I cut-and-paste the 'red-box' output from the remote-kernel'd notebook into a local-kernel notebook, it renders properly.

Any thoughts on how to get the local notebook kernel to jibe with the output of the remote kernel?

Edit: Fixed in 11.2

• This is broken since 11.1. Jun 7, 2017 at 19:38
• Yes,I have the same problem as you.ref:mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/146823/… Jun 8, 2017 at 6:31
• Same problem here. Plus random crashes. Jun 8, 2017 at 15:45
• According to WRI, known bug. They're working on it™ In the mean time Developer\$DisableInteractivity = True makes the graphs show up w/o interactivity, of course.
– flip
Jun 8, 2017 at 17:12
• @flip It has been fixed in 11.2 Sep 26, 2017 at 9:04