[Rd] Minumum memory requirements to run R.

[Uwe Ligges]

Liaw, Andy wrote:

> From: Kjetil Brinchmann Halvorsen
> 
>>Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
>>
>>>Quite a while back we set the goal of running R in 16Mb 
>>
>>RAM, as people (I 
>>
>>>think Kjetil) had teaching labs that small.
>>
>>It's a while since I actually har R used on such small 
>>machines, I think
>>64 MB is quite acceptable now.
>>
>>Kjetil
>>
>>
>>>Since then R has grown, and we has recently started to 
>>
>>optimize R for 
>>
>>>speed rather than size.  I recently tested R-devel on my 
>>
>>ancient Win98 
>>
>>>notebook with 64Mb RAM -- it ran but startup was rather 
>>
>>slow on what I 
>>
>>>think is a 233MHz processor and very slow disc.
>>>
>>>R still runs in 16Mb, but that is getting tight.  Does 
>>
>>anyone have any 
>>
>>>need to run on a smaller machine than my 64Mb notebook?
> 
> 
> I sure don't, but I wouldn't be surprised if one of these days someone
> figures out how to get R to run on a video card...  (I recall that there was
> a tutorial session at some datamining conference last year that showed
> people how to use the GPU for numerical computation, so this may not be too
> far fetched.)

If you want to run R on a videocard because of its enormous floating 
point speed, you have access to quite a lot of RAM (fast cards already 
have huge amounts of RAM). Well, my 20 EUR card has 32Mb only, but you 
certainly don't want to perform calculations on it... ;-)

Are there already PCIe cards that support fast writing to the main 
memory (not only fast reading)?

Uwe

> 
> Andy
> 
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