[R] optimal hardware for computations in R?

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 23 Mar 2004, Amit Ghosh wrote:

> I am planning to buy a new PC for computing simulations in R under
> Linux. I was searching the web/mailing list-archives for useful hints
> about the "optimal" choice of hardware - surprisingly I found no recent
> topics.

Most of seem to be buying dual Opterons, not least so we can potentially 
access more than 4Gb.

> As far as I know, R doesn't use threads, so I think that there should be
> no benefit in choosing a dual-processor machine.

It certainly can use a threaded BLAS.  You can also do two simulation runs 
simultaneously (and surely you will be doing more than one run?).

> So the remaining affordable choices seems to be Athlon XP, Pentium 4,
> Xeon or Athlon64/Opteron. Are there any R-related benchmarks or should
> one simply look about the "standard" benchmark-results (SPEC, etc.)? Any
> hints or experiences would be appreciated!

It really does depend on what exactly your computations do.  There are R 
`benchmarks', but they are not typical tasks (for me, and probably for no 
one else).

I would buy either a dual Athlon MP or a dual Opteron, and not worry too
much about this -- anything you buy today will look slow next year, and
you are not likely to see differences as large as 2x on one processor.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595