[R] R on Linux/Opteron?

[Luke Tierney]

On 26 Aug 2003, Peter Dalgaard BSA wrote:

> Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org> writes:
> 
> > On Tue, Aug 26, 2003 at 03:17:19PM -0400, Liaw, Andy wrote:
> > > Has anyone tried using R on the the AMD Opteron in either 64- or 32-bit
> > > mode?  If so, any good/bad experiences, comments, etc?  We are considering
> > > getting this hardware, and would like to know if R can run smoothly on such
> > > a beast.  Any comment much appreciated.
> > 
> > http://buildd.debian.org/build.php?&pkg=r-base&arch=ia64&file=log
> > 
> > has logs of R builds on ia64 since Nov 2001, incl. the outcome of make
> > check. We do not run the torture tests -- though I guess we could on some of
> > the beefier hardware such as ia64. 
> 
> I don't think that's quite the same beast, though. Opterons are the
> "x86-64" (or amd64) architecture and ia64 is Intel's, aka Itanium.
> Debian appears to be just warming up to including this architecture:
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-x86-64/2003/debian-x86-64-200308/threads.html
> whereas they have had ia64 out for a while.
> 
> SuSE has an Opteron option and Luke said he tried it. Apparently it
> has a functioning 64-bit compiler toolchain - I weren't sure earlier
> whether they were just running a 64bit kernel and 32bit applications,
> but when Luke says so, I believe it...
> 

I wasn't sure either, especially about default settings, but 'file' says

luke/R> file bin/R.bin 
bin/R.bin: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, AMD x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), not stripped

and in R

> Sys.info()["machine"]
 machine 
"x86_64" 
> .Machine$sizeof.pointer
[1] 8

So it looks like a functional 64-bit setup so far.

luke

-- 
Luke Tierney
University of Iowa                  Phone:             319-335-3386
Department of Statistics and        Fax:               319-335-3017
   Actuarial Science
241 Schaeffer Hall                  email:      luke at stat.uiowa.edu
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