R on Large Data Sets (again)
On Sun, 29 Nov 2009, Jason Morgan wrote:
On 2009.11.28 21:50:09, Daniel Nordlund wrote:
- Is a Unix-like platform a better option than win-64? Again, would this solve my memory limitation problems?
Possibly, but Win64 should provide plenty of memory (I believe Windows 7 Ultimate can use up to 192 GB of memory). You just have to find the system that can take that much... With Unix/Linux you can probably cut back some overhead, and the memory management is most likely better, but unless you need to go over 192GB of memory, you don't necessarily have to move to a different platform. ~Jason
Windows 64-bit can certainly handle large memory spaces, but unless something has changed recently it my understanding Revolution Computing's 64-bit is the only 64-bit version of R available for Windows (due to the unavailability of adequate open source compilers for 64-bit Windows). So 64-bit R will need to be Revolution's solution or a non-Windows platform.
Or use a commercial Windows compiler.
It appears that GNU does have a project that has had some success at compiling 64 bit Windows applications: http://mingw-w64.sourceforge.net/
Well, some interesed people have a project to port GCC and binutils: as far as I am aware that is not an official GNU project.
Not sure if all of the pieces are there for an R build, though.
You are welcome to show us how to do it (on the R-devel list): several people have spent man months attempting this (including submitting many patches to that project), and the rw-FAQ did tell you do so in http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/rw-FAQ.html#How-can-I-compile-R-from-source_003f
-- Jason W. Morgan Graduate Student Department of Political Science *The Ohio State University* 154 North Oval Mall Columbus, Ohio 43210
Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595