[R] Hardwarefor R cpu 64 vs 32, dual vs quad

[Dr Eberhard Lisse]

Nic,

I'd buy a Mac Power server.

Not that's much faster, but while one of the cores toils away
at R you can play games on the others :-)-O

el

on 9/9/08 8:54 PM Henrik Bengtsson said the following:
> On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 6:31 AM, Nic Larson <niklar at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Need to buy fast computer for running R on. Today we use 2,8 MHz intel D cpu
>> and the calculations takes around 15 days. Is it possible to get the same
>> calculations down to minutes/hours by only changing the hardware?
>> Should I go for an really fast dual 32 bit cpu and run R over linux or xp or
>> go for an quad core / 64 bit cpu?
>> Is it effective to run R on 64 bit (and problem free
>> (running/installing))???
>> Have around 2000-3000 euro to spend
> 
> Faster machines won't do that much.  Without knowing what methods and
> algorithms you are running, I bet you a beer that it can be made twice
> as fast by just optimizing the code.  My claim applies recursively.
> In other words, by optimizing the algorithms/code you can speed up
> things quite a bit.  From experience, it is not unlikely to find
> bottlenecks in generic algorithms that can be made 10-100 times
> faster.  Here is *one* example illustrating that even when you think
> the code is "fully optimized" you can still squeeze out more:
> 
>   http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki/doku.php?id=tips:programming:code_optim2
> 
> So, start profiling your code to narrow down the parts that takes most
> of the CPU time.  help(Rprof) is a start.  There is also a Section
> 'Profiling R code for speed' in 'Writing R Extensions'.  Good old
> verbose print out of system.time() also helps.
> 
> My $.02 ...or 2000-3000USD if it was bounty?! ;)
> 
> /Henrik
> 
>> Thanx for any tip
>>
>>        [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>
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>>
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
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> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.

-- 
Dr. Eberhard W. Lisse  \        / Obstetrician & Gynaecologist (Saar)
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