Dual Core vs Quad Core
I ran a bayesian simulation sometime ago and it took me 1 week to finish on a debian box (Dell PE 2850 Dual Intel Xeon at 3.6GHz 6GB). I think it depends on the setting of the experiment and whether the code can be parallelized.
Simon Blomberg wrote:
I've been running R on a quad-core using Debian Gnu/Linux since March this year, and I am very pleased with the performance. Simon. On Mon, 2007-12-17 at 20:13 -0500, Andrew Perrin wrote:
On Mon, 17 Dec 2007, Kitty Lee wrote:
Dear R-users, I use R to run spatial stuff and it takes up a lot of ram. Runs can take hours or days. I am thinking of getting a new desktop. Can R take advantage of the dual-core system? I have a dual-core computer at work. But it seems that right now R is using only one processor. The new computers feature quad core with 3GB of RAM. Can R take advantage of the 4 chips? Or am I better off getting a dual core with faster processing speed per chip? Thanks! Any advice would be really appreciated! K.
If I have my information right, R will use dual- or quad-cores if it's doing two (or four) things at once. The second core will help a little bit insofar as whatever else your machine is doing won't interfere with the one core on which it's running, but generally things that take a single thread will remain on a single core. As for RAM, if you're doing memory-bound work you should certainly be using a 64-bit machine and OS so you can utilize the larger memory space. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Andrew J Perrin - andrew_perrin (at) unc.edu - http://perrin.socsci.unc.edu Associate Professor of Sociology; Book Review Editor, _Social Forces_ University of North Carolina - CB#3210, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3210 USA
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