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

[Whit Armstrong]

You should think about the cloud as a serious alternative.

I completely agree with Barry.  Unless you will utilize your machines
(and by utilize, I mean 100% cpu usage) all the time (including
weekends) you will probably better use your funds to purchase blocks
of machines when you need to run your sim, and turn them off
afterwards.

There are some new packages that make it very easy to access the cloud
from a local R session (in an lapply like way).  Happy to point those
out to you if you are interested...

-Whit



On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 11:50 AM, Hugh Morgan <h.morgan at har.mrc.ac.uk> wrote:
> On 05/08/2012 12:14 PM, Zhou Fang wrote:
>>
>> How many data points do you have?
>>
>
> Currently 200,000.  We are likely to have 10 times that in 5 years.
>
>
>>  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.
>
>
> Because of the nature of the funding we are likely to be better off buying.
>  We are likely to be running most of the time, most of the analysis must be
> rerun as more data becomes available, and that is likely to happen a few
> times every week.
>
> Thank you for all the pointers, we shall consider them all.
>
>
>
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