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

[Michael Sumner]

It's not water vapour: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg12qNRgSag

On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 2:20 AM, peter dalgaard <pdalgd at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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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>>>> 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.
>>>
>>> ______________________________________________
>>> 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.
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> 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
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>



-- 
Michael Sumner
Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania
Hobart, Australia
e-mail: mdsumner at gmail.com