[R] Best Server Options

[Cedrick W. Johnson]

this *may* help, my setup is as follows:

I have 2 boxes, one a Windows Server 2008 instance. I installed R 2.10.1 
and 2.11 on them, and used the Remote App function to create a remote 
app "icon" that users (x 4 currently) put on their desktop. Yes, that 
setup needs Terminal Services to work, but so far I haven't seen any 
major complaints.

The second box is just running ubuntu, again for multiple users (x 3 
currently) along with 2 Rserve daemon instances running on diff ports. I 
haven't noticed anything wrong with running that as well.

The only thing I see occasionally is if all users are running a certain 
section of some homegrown scripts that creates a SNOW cluster on the 8 
core win08 server, there's 4 x 8 snow instances... takes a bit more time 
to execute rather than just 1 or 2 users. I haven't quantified yet how 
much more time exactly, but no complaints.

hth
c

On 5/24/2010 7:13 PM, dherrlin wrote:
>
> I am planning to purchase a server to dedicate to running R processes. 4-5
> analysts will use the server and it must have capabilities to process large
> data sets fast. I am not sure if Windows or Linux based servers are better
> or what specs I should be focused on for optimum production. Also is Linux
> required in order to utilize multiple processors concurrently for a single
> process?
>
> Dan Herrlin