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

[John Laing]

For 200,000 analyses at 1.5 seconds each, you're looking at ~83 hours
of computing time. You can buy time from Amazon at roughly $0.08 /
core / hour, so it would cost about $7 to run your analyses in the
cloud. Assuming complete parallelization you could fire up as many
machines as you need to get the work done in as little time as you
want, with the same fixed cost. I think that's a pretty compelling
argument, compared to the hassles of buying and maintaining hardware,
power supply, air conditioning, etc.

John

On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 1:12 PM, Hugh Morgan <h.morgan at har.mrc.ac.uk> wrote:
> 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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