[Rd] Running R on dual/quad Opteron machines

[Sean Davis]

On 3/6/06 11:50 AM, "Simone Giannerini" <sgiannerini at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.

You will have to implement some parallelization code yourself in order to
take full advantage of the multiple processors.  See below.

> 2. How does R cope with parallelization and/or parallelized compiled code ?

You might look at the Rmpi and snow packages for parallelization from within
R.  We use Rmpi and snow for analyses like simulation and have found these
applications quite easy to implement in parallel from within R.