thanks, dirk. I just read your tutorial. great information for our needs.

alas, the Amazon economics do not work well for us. the server that I am  
planning to purchase should cost around $800 and is the equivalent of the  
high-intensive CPU, which goes for $0.80/hour. that's about 2 months of  
amazon server time for the same price. if administering the hardware is  
very costly, then amazon is cost-effective. fortunately, we believe we can  
run the hardware easily ourselves.

I wonder how long it will take before debian will offer a GUI program that  
allow users like us to "rent out" a server for cash, and credit them via  
paypal. alas, maybe a special R cloud distribution (that has "everything R"  
already installed, too) could support the R project itself?! I would donate  
our free CPU time to the R project when the CPU is not otherwise used.  
probably some others would do the same, too.

regards,

/ivo



On Mar 28, 2009 9:56am, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd@debian.org> wrote:


> On 28 March 2009 at 13:37, ivowel@gmail.com wrote:

> | I need to speed up my monte-carlo simulations. my code is written in R  
> (and

> | it was also the cause of my many questions here over the last few  
> days). my

> [...]

> | with $10/GB of DRAM, this is no longer a bottleneck. For my application,

> | parallelism is a given, since most of it is monte-carlo simulations. (I

> [...]

> | My operating system will probably be ubuntu. (I also run a little of it  
> on

> | an OSX Mac Pro I own.)



> One thing you could consider is renting the compute hours from the cloud:



> http://aws.amazon.com/ec2



> as EC2 now has a choice of Debian and Ubuntu (among others) and Debian /

> Ubuntu have R and Open MPI work out of the box. Examples as in my 'Intro  
> to

> High Performance Computing with R' tutorials from UseR and the BoC [  
> google

> for the pdf slides if interested ] should apply 'as is', you don't need to

> fiddle with (physical) hardware and can scale up CPU resources as needed.



> Dirk



> --

> Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.


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