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

[Hugh Morgan]

On 05/08/2012 06:02 PM, Rich Shepard wrote:
> On Tue, 8 May 2012, Hugh Morgan wrote:
>
>> Perhaps I have confused the issue. When I initially said "data points" I
>> meant one stand alone analysis, not one piece of data. Each analysis 
>> point
>> takes 1.5 seconds. I have not implemented running this over the whole
>> dataset yet, but I would expect it to take about 5 to 10 hours. This is
>> just about acceptable, but it would be better if this was quicker. As I
>> say, the exact analysis method has not yet been determined, and if that
>> was significantly more computationally intensive then that could be an
>> issue.
>
>   If I had to do what you write above, I would separate the data into
> chunks; one for each core/CPU in my system. Then I would invoke R to 
> run on
> each core/CPU and have that instance process one data set. With 
> sufficient
> memory for each core/CPU the processing will occur in parallel and cut 
> the
> overall time by the number of instances running.
>
>   You might want to turn up the air conditioning around the system 'cause
> that CPU is going to be working hard.

That is roughly how I am working on getting it running currently, and 
the 5 hour estimate assumes that is perfectly parallelisable.

We have a server room with a reasonable air con.  I have only just 
thought about adding the extra cooling to the total cost, but I suspect 
that that will come from a different budget so may not matter so much.  
I shall include it in the quote until told to do otherwise.

>
> Rich
>
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