[R] Powerful PC to run R

[Mike Marchywka]

> Date: Fri, 13 May 2011 12:38:51 +0200
> From: haenlein at escpeurope.eu
> To: r-help at r-project.org
> Subject: [R] Powerful PC to run R
>
> Dear all,
>
> I'm currently running R on my laptop -- a Lenovo Thinkpad X201 (Intel Core
> i7 CPU, M620, 2.67 Ghz, 8 GB RAM). The problem is that some of my
> calculations run for several days sometimes even weeks (mainly simulations
> over a large parameter space). Depending on the external conditions, my
> laptop sometimes shuts down due to overheating.
>
> I'm now thinking about buying a more powerful desktop PC or laptop. Can
> anybody advise me on the best configuration to run R as fast as possible? I
> will use this PC exclusively for R so any other factors are of limited
> importance.

( I think my laptop is overheating with firefox trying to execute whatever
stupid code hotmail is using  ssh to remote server echos keys faster LOL)
The point of the above is that it really depends what you
are doing. Heat can com from disk drive as well as silicon. Generally
you'd want to consider algorithm and implementation and get profiling info
before just buying bigger hammer. If you are thrashing VM, sorting
some data may help for example. If it is suited parallelism, you could
even try to distribute task over several cheaper computers, hard to knwo.


>
> Thanks,