[R] recommended computing server for R (March 2009)?

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 28 March 2009 at 14:36, ivowel at gmail.com wrote:
| thanks, dirk. I just read your tutorial. great information for our needs.

My pleasure.

| alas, the Amazon economics do not work well for us. the server that I am  
| planning to purchase should cost around $800 and is the equivalent of the  
| high-intensive CPU, which goes for $0.80/hour. that's about 2 months of  
| amazon server time for the same price. if administering the hardware is  
| very costly, then amazon is cost-effective. fortunately, we believe we can  
| run the hardware easily ourselves.

A steady supply of grad students can do that do a project, I suppose.
 
| I wonder how long it will take before debian will offer a GUI program that  
| allow users like us to "rent out" a server for cash, and credit them via  
| paypal. alas, maybe a special R cloud distribution (that has "everything R"  
| already installed, too) could support the R project itself?! I would donate  
| our free CPU time to the R project when the CPU is not otherwise used.  
| probably some others would do the same, too.

Debian never will as it is strictly a non-profit. Canonical (Ubuntu's paren)
might -- the next Ubuntu release will already contain what is said to be an
'amazon-ec2-compatible' "build you own cloud" system based on the Eucalyptus
system from UCSB: http://eucalyptus.cs.ucsb.edu/

A PS to your original question:  IIRC you can also buy systems from Dell and
HP with Ubuntu pre-installed.  Ubuntu gives you Atlas, you can try to add the
non-free Goto blas, or the commerical MKL blas, or ... to further speed up
your inner linear models (now that you learned about lm.fit() et al).

The rest of the discussion, incl the hardware and esp administration aspect,
may be more appropriate for r-sig-hpc (subscription needed for posting...)

Dirk

-- 
Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.