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Linux Standalone Server Suggestions for R

Campbell 
I think I remember reading somewhere that using Sun Studio compiler
generates binaries that run faster than those built using GCC. 
Presumably this performance gain is increased if the Sun Fortran 95
compiler is used.

Whether the substantial cost of Sun Studio is money better spent than
that on extra RAM or bigger processors is not something I can answer.

HTH

Phineas
Jia-Shing,
I missed your original message, but would like to reiterate Bogdan's
comments and suggestions.

In a former life, a colleague of mine led the way for us to construct a
"small farm" of Opteron servers that all had 2 AMD64 CPU's, SUSE
Enterprise
Server OS, and the ability to have up to 16GB RAM. We experimented with
clustering them but that was not successful, and for practical purposes,
not
necessary. Penguin computing (http://www.penguincomputing.com) provided
us
very reliable products, solutions, and service, and I am sure there are
other vendors just as capable. As Bogdan mentioned, search the r-help
archives for various discussions on this over the past few years.

With $50K US, you likely will come up more computing power than you can
dream of (for now at least :-). That can get you multiple 16GB 2CPU
machines, I believe.

Good luck!

Hope that helps,
Bill

-------------------------------
Bill Pikounis, PhD
Nonclinical Statistics
Centocor, Inc.
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