Recently I posted to this list with a question about using the Intel 10.1
compilers in building R and one response was basically, "why in the heck
would you want to do that?" The answer is that my sysadmin believes that
there will be a performance boost with the Intel vs. Gnu compilers on our
Linux cluster, of which I am one of many users. Wanting to be a good citizen
and use my machine time wisely, I'd of course like to use right tool to
build the most efficient installation of R and associated packages. BTW, we
got R to compile nicely using the settings at the end of this post.

Looking back on previous posts, however, it seems that there is no consensus
as to how to benchmark R. I realize such a task is not trivial, nor
controversial, but does anyone have a set of time-consuming tasks that can
be used to compare R installations? It would seem logical that such a
benchmark would include sub-benchmarks on file access, interpreted intensive
tasks, C intensive tasks, BLAS intensive tasks, etc. You developers know
more about this than I do, but I know enough to realize that there won't be
one simple answer. Nevertheless, I'd like to make my usage decisions on
something rather than anedotal claims.

So, does anyone know of a good benchmarking script or would be willing to
contribute one?

And here are the settings we used to compile R with Intel 10.1 compilers:

../configure --prefix=/N/u/mkimpel/R_HOME/R-patched/R-build \
--with-system-zlib=/usr/lib64 --with-system-bzlib=/usr/lib64 \
--with-mpi=/N/soft/linux-rhel4-x86_64/openmpi/1.2.5/intel-64 --with-tcltk \
--with-tcl-config=/N/soft/linux-rhel4-x86_64/tcl8.4.16/lib64/tclConfig.sh \
--with-tk-config=/N/soft/linux-rhel4-x86_64/tk8.4.16/lib64/tkConfig.sh \
--without-x --without-readline --without-iconv \
CC="/N/soft/linux-rhel4-x86_64/intel/cce/10.1.013/bin/icc" \
CFLAGS="-O3 -no-prec-div -unroll" \
F77="/N/soft/linux-rhel4-x86_64/intel/fce/10.1.013/bin/ifort" \
FFLAGS="-O3 -no-prec-div -unroll" \
CXX="/N/soft/linux-rhel4-x86_64/intel/cce/10.1.013/bin/icpc" \
CXXFLAGS="-O3 -no-prec-div -unroll" \
FC="/N/soft/linux-rhel4-x86_64/intel/fce/10.1.013/bin/ifort" \
FCFLAGS="-O3 -no-prec-div -unroll" \
OBJC="/N/soft/linux-rhel4-x86_64/intel/cce/10.1.013/bin/icc" \
OBJCFLAGS="-O3 -no-prec-div -unroll" \
--disable-R-profiling --disable-memory-profiling
##
make all
make install

Mark

-- 
Mark W. Kimpel MD ** Neuroinformatics ** Dept. of Psychiatry
Indiana University School of Medicine

15032 Hunter Court, Westfield, IN 46074

(317) 490-5129 Work, & Mobile & VoiceMail
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