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

[peter dalgaard]

On May 9, 2012, at 17:46 , Michael Sumner wrote:

> Barry, *fortunes* are very auspicious but you are already well represented.

"..as nebulous as cloud computing..", indeed!

> Cheers, Mike.
> 
> On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 1:38 AM, Whit Armstrong
> <armstrong.whit at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I don't work for Amazon, but here is one of their promo pieces on
>> using 'spot' instances:
>> http://youtu.be/WD9N73F3Fao
>> 
>> at about 2:15, they cite University of Melbourne and Universitat de
>> Barcelona as customers...
>> 
>> My interest in all this cloud talk is that I'll be presenting a
>> tutorial on R in the cloud at R/Finance.
>> http://www.rinfinance.com/agenda/
>> 
>> It's really easy to use R in the cloud, even if you don't want to move
>> your data into s3.
>> 
>> -Whit
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 9:36 AM, Barry Rowlingson
>> <b.rowlingson at lancaster.ac.uk> wrote:
>>> On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 2:22 PM, John Laing <john.laing at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> 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.
>>> 
>>>  Noticing Hugh's .ac.uk email address you do have to factor in the
>>> hassle of getting something as nebulous as cloud computing past the
>>> red tape. "How much will it cost?" says the bureaucrat. "Depends how
>>> much CPU time I need", says the academic. "So potentially, what's the
>>> most?" says the bureaucrat. "Millions,", says the academic, honestly,
>>> adding "but that would only be if my job scheduling went a bit mad and
>>> grabbed a few thousand Amazon cores and thrashed them for weeks
>>> without me noticing". "Okay", says the bureaucrat, "now, can we send
>>> Amazon a purchase order so that Amazon send us an invoice for this
>>> unknown and potentially unpredictable cost first?". "Oh no", says the
>>> academic, "we need a credit card...".
>>> 
>>> Maybe there are other ways of paying for Amazon cloud CPUs, I've not
>>> investigated. Anyone in academia happily crunching on EC2?
>>> 
>>> Barry
>>> 
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>> 
>> ______________________________________________
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>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
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>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Michael Sumner
> Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania
> Hobart, Australia
> e-mail: mdsumner at gmail.com
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.

-- 
Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Phone: (+45)38153501
Email: pd.mes at cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com