[R] R 64-bit and Revolution

[David Smith]

On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 4:12 PM, Lars Bishop <lars52r at gmail.com> wrote:
> The company where I work is considering getting a license for Revolution
> Enterprise - Windows 64-bit. I'll appreciate for those familiar with the
> product if can share your experiences with it? In particular, how does it
> compare to the "free" version of R 64-bit?

(I work for Revolution Analytics.)

Here are the main differences:

* The GUI allows you to set breakpoints interactively and do step
debugging. There's a short video of it in action here:
http://bit.ly/bmAlqA

* We optimize the compilation and link it against the Intel MKL
libraries, which makes some linear algebra routines use all cores and
run faster. More details: http://bit.ly/btLUmb

* It includes the foreach, doSMP and doNWS packages, for multicore and
distributed parallel computing.

* It includes the RevoScaleR package (in the upcoming release, out at
the end of this month), for statistical analysis of very large data
sets. Details in this white paper:
http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/bigdata/ (reg. req'd)

* It's supported.

Otherwise, the core open-source R engine is just that: R (namely, R
2.11.1 in the upcoming release), and so works exactly as you'd expect.

Hope that helps,
# David Smith

--
David M Smith <david at revolutionanalytics.com>
VP of Marketing, Revolution Analytics  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com
Tel: +1 (650) 330-0553 x205 (Palo Alto, CA, USA)