Hi, 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. 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. 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! Thanks in advance, Amit
optimal hardware for computations in R?
5 messages · Amit Ghosh, Brian Ripley, Paul Y. Peng +1 more
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.
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
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.
On Tue, 2004-03-23 at 08:08, Paul Y. Peng wrote:
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.
<snip> Paul, Others may chime in here, but you should be aware that there are still lingering problems with Linux and HT in uni-processor systems, at least using stock 2.4 (and even 2.6 kernels). There is a good article at 2cpu.com on HT and the 2.6 kernels here: http://www.2cpu.com/articles/41_1.html Under FC1, which I use, there are issues with the 2.4 SMP kernels with HT enabled. I have a 3.2 Ghz P4 with HT in a Dell i5150 laptop. I had to disable HT in BIOS and am running the UP kernel, due to a list of known bugs in the FC1 2.4 kernel series, which include boot lockups, other boot time errors and even things as subtle as keyboard related problems. Also, according to Alan Cox at RH, there are still performance tuning issues relative to process and thread scheduling for HT on the 2.6 kernels that are yet to be included (but will be). As you will see from the above article, the gains to be had from HT are likely to be situationally specific and not an "all or nothing" gain. HTH, Marc Schwartz
On Tue, 23 Mar 2004, Paul Y. Peng wrote:
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.
I do have such a machine as my home machine, so I already have experience under Fedora Core 1 and Windows XP. The gain over a single processor is small compared to a dual processor (at best 1.2x in my experience), and many magazine tests have recommended turning hyperthreading off. I know that a dual Athlon 2600 (my office machine) compiles R about twice as fast as a Pentium 2.6HT, for example.
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