I am purchasing a quad-core 64-bit system.  My proposed configuration is an
intel core duo quad with 8Gb memory and an ubuntu OS.  I'm choosing ubunto
because I have good local support, but it doesn't seem as well supported as
debian for R.  Will ubuntu limit me in any significant way?   I have noticed
a bias towards AMD machines among R users - are there compelling reasons to
go with an equivalent AMD system instead?  Will I be able to use amd64
binaries on this system, or would I have to compile everything myself?
Would it difficult to install Intel MKL 10.0 BLAS and LAPACK libraries on
this machine?  Would it be difficult to run both 32-bit and 64-bit versions
of R on this machine?  The most computationally-intensive thing I will be
using the machine for is large MCMC simulations, probably using multiple
instances of LinBUGS.  Any advice on configuring by machine for maximum
speed for these simulations?

Thanks,

Alan Swanson

 


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