[R-sig-hpc] Advice on HPC/R needs for advanced computing oversight committee

[Suzen, Mehmet]

Hi David,

Updating packages or the base should not be an issue as long as deployment and
development platforms are identical. But that is a valid problem for
any software
project, it is too generic to be Rs problem only.

>> nascent advanced computing initiative.  What hardware issues do you see as
>> most critical?  Software?  What kinds of consulting resources would you
>> want
>> to have available to facilitate your R-related work?  Any recommendations

Step 0 would be to first start exploring current HPC capabilities.
There is a very well
maintained classification in views:
http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/HighPerformanceComputing.html

Each solution address to different architecture. I would take each sub-title
there and generate "minimal" hardware requirement for each.
So It is all depends on your needs and applications.

Concerning consultancy, there are very successful R companies (I don't want to
advertise names; ask me off the list) that provides off the shelf
parallel R solutions, optimized
packages/R-core and support.

>> for introductory material on high performance computing in R that I should
>> read to get up to speed?  Thanks in advance for any comments/advice.

Probably this book came up  in the list before;  Parallel R  :
http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920021421.do

Also this resource list is pretty good

http://rdatamining.wordpress.com/2012/05/06/online-resources-for-handling-big-data-and-parallel-computing-in-r/

I have noticed that you work with MCMC. The parallel R solutions guru
on MCMC is Professor Wilkinson of
Newcastle University. His posts are quite pedagogical:

http://darrenjw.wordpress.com/2011/12/29/parallel-particle-filtering-and-pmcmc-using-r-and-multicore/