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

[Bert Gunter]

Probably just pointing out the obvious, but:

200,000 data points may not be that many these days, depending on the
dimensionality of the data. Nor is 10 times that number, neither now
nor in 5 years, again depending on data dimensionality. So my question
is, have you actually tried running your simulations -- or a
reasonable approximation thereof -- on a single "cheap" machine? It
might be that your concerns are overblown, especially with multicore
and parallelization.

Obviously, ignore if you've already done this and know it's nonsense.

Cheers,
Bert

On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 8:50 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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-- 

Bert Gunter
Genentech Nonclinical Biostatistics

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