Running R on dual/quad Opteron machines
Dear Sean, many thanks for the suggestion, I will have a look at the packages. Regards, Simone
On 3/6/06, Sean Davis <sdavis2 at mail.nih.gov> wrote:
On 3/6/06 11:50 AM, "Simone Giannerini" <sgiannerini at gmail.com> wrote:
Dear all, I am managing a departmental purchase of an Opteron based workstation/server for scientific computing on which we will be running R. The environment will probably be either Unix/Linux or Solaris and the amount of RAM will be 8-16Gb, depending on the number of processors. My main concerns are the following: 1. How much does R benefit from passing from one processor to two/four processor machines? Consider that the typical intensive use of the server will be represented by simulation studies with many repeated loops.
You will have to implement some parallelization code yourself in order to take full advantage of the multiple processors. See below.
2. How does R cope with parallelization and/or parallelized compiled code ?
You might look at the Rmpi and snow packages for parallelization from within R. We use Rmpi and snow for analyses like simulation and have found these applications quite easy to implement in parallel from within R.
-- ______________________________________________________ Simone Giannerini Dipartimento di Scienze Statistiche "Paolo Fortunati" Universita' di Bologna Via delle belle arti 41 - 40126 Bologna, ITALY Tel: +39 051 2098248 Fax: +39 051 232153 E-mail: giannerini at stat.unibo.it