Dear R-developers,

the following may seem a weird question for R-devel – I try anyway, because it 
does seem to be related to usage of R and R's way of interacting with the 
hardware.

When running R (2.4.0) on my new dual core Windows XP system (Intel Core 2 Duo 
E6600, Mainboard ASUS P5B, BeQuiet Power Unit), I observe various types of 
sounds (not related to fans) when running at full usage of at least one of the 
cores.

The most annoying sound – a high-pitched noise like a whine – I have so far 
observed running simulations in R only and couldn’t reproduce with any other 
software (sometimes it’s also more a rustle than a whine, that one is not 
disturbing). I can clearly track it down to particular instances of R – as 
soon as I left-click on a blue window bar in the affected R-Gui, the noise 
stops (and there are sometimes other instances of R running in parallel which 
are completely unrelated to the whine). I’ve also stopped R when the computer 
just whined and started SAS, fully using the CPU as well – no whine. Shut down 
SAS, restart R à whine again. Apparently, it can also be related to what 
exactly R is doing at the particular moment. For example, I just discovered 
that simulations of one type were finished, because the computer – running 
another simulation under full load on R in a quiet way – started whining at 
the moment it switched to the new type of simulation.

The hardware technician I’ve asked about this issue does not have any idea and 
suspects R to do something peculiar that causes the noise. It’s not the 
mainboards fault (that has already been changed for another reason, and the 
behavior remains). I can’t definitely locate the source of the sound. I 
suspect that it’s the Power Unit, but there are so many parts close together 
that I am not really sure.

I do not know enough about interactions of R with hardware to know whether it 
is even possible for anyone deeper into the matter to develop an idea what 
could be behind this behavior. For the moment, I can get rid of the whine by 
using the mainboard tool „AI Gear“ to reduce the processor’s speed from 2.4GHz 
to 1.7GHz when I want to concentrate – then the whine is gone (but the 
simulation is slower).

Does anyone have any idea – or hints regarding what else I could think about ?

Regards, Ulrike

****************************** 
Prof. Dr. Ulrike Grömping 
Fachbereich II 
TFH Berlin 
Luxemburger Str. 10 
13353 Berlin 
mail: groemping@tfh-berlin.de 
www: www.tfh-berlin.de/~groemp/ 
******************************

------- End of Forwarded Message -------

****************************** 
Prof. Dr. Ulrike Grömping 
Fachbereich II 
TFH Berlin 
Luxemburger Str. 10 
13353 Berlin 
mail: groemping@tfh-berlin.de 
www: www.tfh-berlin.de/~groemp/ 
******************************

 

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

