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

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 11:49 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

 Why buy when you can rent? Unless your hardware is going to be
running 24/7 doing these analyses then you are paying for it to sit
idle. You might be better off purchasing computing time from Amazon or
another cloud computing provider. If you need to run more analyses
quickly, just buy some more virtual hosts.

Also saves on needing to run a data center, hardware warranty costs,
disposing 10U of rack-mounted obsolete hardware after five years etc.
Obviously the rental cost includes all these things as expenses of the
cloud computing provider, but they have massive economies of scale.

 I've not gone this way yet for any projects I've been involved with,
but its becoming more of a possibility with every grant award we
get...

Barry