Hardware Suggestions
On Fri, 21 Jan 2005, Peter Dalgaard wrote:
"Jon Dressel" <jdressel at surromed.com> writes:
We are currently running R under Windows 2000 on a server box running with 2 1.2 GHZ Intel Pentium III Processors. We would like to run this on a new computer running Linux and receive a significant speed increase over our current implementation. Could anyone provide some suggestions for a fast 64 BIT Intel based processor computer with a recommendation for memory and speed/type/number of processors. Also which version of R would install "out-of-the-box" easily on this computer and what version of Linux should be used? Thanks in advance for any help.
(I assume "Intel" also means AMD?) People seem quite happy with dual and quad Opterons (and there are dual-core chips coming up soon, I hear), but you do need to do your homework, since there have been trouble with some chipsets/BIOSes in large-memory configurations, and there are not all that many people using the high-end stuff. Check out the archives of the x86_64 mailing lists for the popular Linux distributions.
Just find a good box-builder and let them take care of such details. We have several dual Opterons as well as a 100+ processor cluster.
Distribution-wise Fedora Core and SuSE both work nicely and R has been tested on both with no issues that I can think of. There's an RPM up for FC3, but it's not a big hassle to build from source and you need most of the build tools in place to install CRAN packages anyway.
Agreed. You do need recent versions of the OS (FC3 works better than FC2, and a lot better than the version of RHEL3 we returned for a refund: we also run SuSe 9.x). People have been running 64-bit R for a long time on other hardware and I have run systematic tests across CRAN on one of our x86_64s. All but a handful of maintainers have responded to my change suggestions and so almost all packages have passes their tests.
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