[R] Powerful PC to run R

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 11:38 AM, Michael Haenlein
<haenlein at escpeurope.eu> wrote:

> 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.

> Michael Haenlein
> Assocaite Professor of Marketing

 As a Professor of Marketing surely you buy whatever Apple tell you to?

 Seriously, 'as fast as possible'? No financial constraints? Then
spend several billion in a factory and some hardware developers to run
R on bare silicon. Too much? Spend a million on a data centre and
stuff it full of rack servers, and some software developers to make
your algorithms run in parallel on the cluster.

 Secondly, speed is massively dependent on exactly what you are doing.
Some jobs are I/O-bound, they can only go as fast as they can read in
or write out data. Some are limited by available RAM, and start
swapping bits of memory to hard disk, slowing things up. Some are
CPU-bound and can go faster by plugging in a faster processor. Some
are bound by internal bus speeds, and can't shuttle information
between RAM and CPU fast enough. The solution to each of these
problems is different. For example, there's no point in buying an
8-core CPU if your programs can only use 1 core at a time, and you
don't think you'll be running 8 programs at once.

 Conclusion: for a desktop PC, get as much fast RAM, the fastest CPU
and the quickest HD you can find. That should cover all the possible
bottlenecks.

Barry