optimal hardware for computations in R?

From: Paul Y. Peng

I recently ordered a computer which is intended to run both WindowsXP
and Linux (of course both versions of R as well). Before placing the
order, I discussed it with our system managers. They highly 
recommanded
a system with one P4 CPU with Intel's so called "hyper-threading"
technology over a system with two CPU's, and they claimed 
that both OS's
can take benefits from the "hyper-threading" technology. I haven't got
the machine yet and don't know how fast it is. At least this 
is another
option available.

Paul.


Prof Brian Ripley wrote:

On Tue, 23 Mar 2004, Amit Ghosh wrote:

I am planning to buy a new PC for computing simulations in R under
Linux. I was searching the web/mailing list-archives for 

useful hints

about the "optimal" choice of hardware - surprisingly I 

found no recent

topics.

Most of seem to be buying dual Opterons, not least so we 

can potentially 

access more than 4Gb.

As far as I know, R doesn't use threads, so I think that 

there should be

no benefit in choosing a dual-processor machine.

It certainly can use a threaded BLAS.  You can also do two 

simulation runs 

simultaneously (and surely you will be doing more than one run?).

So the remaining affordable choices seems to be Athlon XP, 

Pentium 4,

Xeon or Athlon64/Opteron. Are there any R-related 

benchmarks or should

one simply look about the "standard" benchmark-results 

(SPEC, etc.)? Any

hints or experiences would be appreciated!

It really does depend on what exactly your computations do. 

 There are R 

`benchmarks', but they are not typical tasks (for me, and 

probably for no 

one else).

I would buy either a dual Athlon MP or a dual Opteron, and 

not worry too

much about this -- anything you buy today will look slow 

next year, and

you are not likely to see differences as large as 2x on one 

processor.