[R] What is the most cost effective hardware for R?

[R. Michael Weylandt]

I think the general experience is that R is going to be more
memory-hungry than other resources so you'll get the best bang for
your buck on that end. R also has good parallelization support: that
and other high performance concerns are addressed here:

http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/HighPerformanceComputing.html

Performance (as it is for most computationally expensive tasks) will
likely be better under Linux and you'll get good free help from
R-SIG-Fedora and R-SIG-Debian if you pick one of those (in addition to
whatever your sys admin can give)

Michael

On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 6:49 AM, Hugh Morgan <h.morgan at har.mrc.ac.uk> wrote:
> Has anyone got any advice about what hardware to buy to run lots of R
> analysis?  Links to studies or other documents would be great as would be
> personal opinion.
>
> We are not currently certain what analysis we shall be running, but our
> first implementation uses the functions lme and gls from the library nlme.
>  To do one data point currently takes 1.5 seconds on our 3 year old sunfire
> box, and the data points are completely independant so the analysis is fully
> parallelisable without implmenting multi-threading within each data point.
>  We have a reasnoble amount of sys admin support in house.  We are an
> academic institution.  We are looking at spending a few thousand to a small
> number of tens of thousands of dollars.
>
> Any help greatly appreciated
>
>
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