[R] Dual Core vs Quad Core

[Saeed Abu Nimeh]

I ran a bayesian simulation sometime ago and it took me 1 week to finish
on a debian box (Dell PE 2850  Dual Intel Xeon at 3.6GHz  6GB). I think it
depends on the setting of the experiment and whether the code can be
parallelized.

Simon Blomberg wrote:
> I've been running R on a quad-core using Debian Gnu/Linux since March
> this year, and I am very pleased with the performance.
> 
> Simon.
> 
> 
> On Mon, 2007-12-17 at 20:13 -0500, Andrew Perrin wrote:
>> On Mon, 17 Dec 2007, Kitty Lee wrote:
>>
>>> Dear R-users,
>>>
>>> I use R to run spatial stuff and it takes up a lot of ram. Runs can take hours or days. I am thinking of getting a new desktop. Can R take advantage of the dual-core system?
>>>
>>> I have a dual-core computer at work. But it seems that right now R is using only one processor.
>>>
>>> The new computers feature quad core with 3GB of RAM. Can R take advantage of the 4 chips? Or am I better off getting a dual core with faster processing speed per chip?
>>>
>>> Thanks! Any advice would be really appreciated!
>>>
>>> K.
>> If I have my information right, R will use dual- or quad-cores if it's 
>> doing two (or four) things at once. The second core will help a little bit 
>> insofar as whatever else your machine is doing won't interfere with the 
>> one core on which it's running, but generally things that take a single 
>> thread will remain on a single core.
>>
>> As for RAM, if you're doing memory-bound work you should certainly be 
>> using a 64-bit machine and OS so you can utilize the larger memory space.
>>
>>
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Andrew J Perrin - andrew_perrin (at) unc.edu - http://perrin.socsci.unc.edu
>> Associate Professor of Sociology; Book Review Editor, _Social Forces_
>> University of North Carolina - CB#3210, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3210 USA
>>
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