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Dual Core vs Quad Core
4 messages · Kitty Lee, Andrew Perrin, Simon Blomberg +1 more
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
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
______________________________________________ R-help at r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Simon Blomberg, BSc (Hons), PhD, MAppStat. Lecturer and Consultant Statistician Faculty of Biological and Chemical Sciences The University of Queensland St. Lucia Queensland 4072 Australia Room 320 Goddard Building (8) T: +61 7 3365 2506 email: S.Blomberg1_at_uq.edu.au Policies: 1. I will NOT analyse your data for you. 2. Your deadline is your problem. The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data. - John Tukey.
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
______________________________________________ R-help at r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.