[R] R on Large Data Sets (again)

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Sun, 29 Nov 2009, Jason Morgan wrote:

> On 2009.11.28 21:50:09, Daniel Nordlund wrote:
>>>> - Is a Unix-like platform a better option than win-64? Again, would
>>>> this solve my memory limitation problems?
>>>
>>> Possibly, but Win64 should provide plenty of memory (I believe Windows 7
>>> Ultimate can use up to 192 GB of memory). You just have to find the
>>> system that can take that much... With Unix/Linux you can probably cut
>>> back some overhead, and the memory management is most likely better, but
>>> unless you need to go over 192GB of memory, you don't necessarily have
>>> to move to a different platform.
>>>
>>> ~Jason
>>
>> Windows 64-bit can certainly handle large memory spaces, but unless
>> something has changed recently it my understanding Revolution
>> Computing's 64-bit is the only 64-bit version of R available for
>> Windows (due to the unavailability of adequate open source compilers
>> for 64-bit Windows).  So 64-bit R will need to be Revolution's
>> solution or a non-Windows platform.

Or use a commercial Windows compiler.

> It appears that GNU does have a project that has had some success at
> compiling 64 bit Windows applications:
>
> http://mingw-w64.sourceforge.net/

Well, some interesed people have a project to port GCC and binutils: 
as far as I am aware that is not an official GNU project.

> Not sure if all of the pieces are there for an R build, though.

You are welcome to show us how to do it (on the R-devel list): several 
people have spent man months attempting this (including submitting 
many patches to that project), and the rw-FAQ did tell you do so in 
http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/rw-FAQ.html#How-can-I-compile-R-from-source_003f

> -- 
> Jason W. Morgan
> Graduate Student
> Department of Political Science
> *The Ohio State University*
> 154 North Oval Mall
> Columbus, Ohio 43210

-- 
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