[Rd] Running R on dual/quad Opteron machines

[Simone Giannerini]

Dear all,

I am managing a departmental purchase of an Opteron based
workstation/server for scientific computing on which we will be
running R.
The environment will probably be either Unix/Linux or Solaris and the
amount of RAM will be 8-16Gb, depending on the number of processors.
My main concerns are the following:

1. How much does R  benefit from passing from one processor to
two/four processor machines? Consider that the typical intensive use
of the server
 will be represented by simulation studies with many repeated loops.
2. How does R cope with parallelization and/or parallelized compiled code ?

I would be very grateful if someone could give suggestions and/or
point me to information on the above mentioned issues.

Regards,

Simone Giannerini

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Simone Giannerini
Dipartimento di Scienze Statistiche "Paolo Fortunati"
Universita' di Bologna
Via delle belle arti 41 - 40126  Bologna,  ITALY
Tel: +39 051 2098248  Fax: +39 051 232153
E-mail: giannerini at stat.unibo.it