Dear SIG members,

 

I am a health economist at the University of Wisconsin Madison.  In part of
my work, I use R and jags to conduct MCMC analysis of clinical and economic
data for medical decision-making.  Over the years, I have slowly waded into
high throughput techniques for conducting “pleasantly parallel” aspects of
my work.  I have dreams of using HPC to enable more efficient Bayesian
analysis of large health care claims datasets – but at this point they are
just dreams.

 

Recently, I have been asked to join a new committee that is charged with
oversight in developing a university-wide advanced computing shared resource
(consisting of both hardware and professional consultation).  The committee
has good representation from traditional HPC disciplines – genomics,
astronomy, nuclear physics – most of whom do not rely upon HPC-enabled R for
their work.  Somehow, despite my relative naiveté (having just recently
moved from manually forking processes and using my own “collector” scripts
to actually using doSNOW), I have found myself a de-facto representative of
the R-users on campus.  One of the charges of the committee is to enable
users to make at least one “step increase” in their computing power.
Perhaps, since I’m basically at step 0, I also represent a large latent
class of R users who could benefit from high throughput/high performance,
but don’t know where to begin.

 

So, I am wondering if any of you have suggestions for me in my committee
role to make sure the needs of the HPC R community are well represented in a
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
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.

 

Best regards,

Dave

 

_______________________________________

David J. Vanness, PhD, Associate Professor

Department of Population Health Sciences

UW School of Medicine and Public Health

610 Walnut Street #785

Madison, WI 53726

Office: 608/265-8600

 <mailto:dvanness@wisc.edu> dvanness@wisc.edu 




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