Advice on HPC/R needs for advanced computing oversight committee
Hi David, Updating packages or the base should not be an issue as long as deployment and development platforms are identical. But that is a valid problem for any software project, it is too generic to be Rs problem only.
nascent advanced computing initiative. What hardware issues do you see as most critical? Software? What kinds of consulting resources would you want to have available to facilitate your R-related work? Any recommendations
Step 0 would be to first start exploring current HPC capabilities. There is a very well maintained classification in views: http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/HighPerformanceComputing.html Each solution address to different architecture. I would take each sub-title there and generate "minimal" hardware requirement for each. So It is all depends on your needs and applications. Concerning consultancy, there are very successful R companies (I don't want to advertise names; ask me off the list) that provides off the shelf parallel R solutions, optimized packages/R-core and support.
for introductory material on high performance computing in R that I should read to get up to speed? Thanks in advance for any comments/advice.
Probably this book came up in the list before; Parallel R : http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920021421.do Also this resource list is pretty good http://rdatamining.wordpress.com/2012/05/06/online-resources-for-handling-big-data-and-parallel-computing-in-r/ I have noticed that you work with MCMC. The parallel R solutions guru on MCMC is Professor Wilkinson of Newcastle University. His posts are quite pedagogical: http://darrenjw.wordpress.com/2011/12/29/parallel-particle-filtering-and-pmcmc-using-r-and-multicore/