[R-SIG-Mac] multiprocessor R?

[Simon Urbanek]

On Apr 17, 2006, at 11:37 AM, Thomas Lumley wrote:

> On Mon, 17 Apr 2006, David Airey wrote:
>
>> Stata has come out with a multiprocessor or multicore version. Is R
>> headed in the same direction? I've been dreaming of buying a new  
>> dual-
>> core notebook.
>
> Not any time really soon.  However, R does benefit from dual  
> processors on
> other systems and so presumably will on the macbooks, just because  
> R can
> occupy one processor and all the other user overhead can be on the  
> other.
>

As Thomas pointed out dual core is always a win (once you work on a  
dual machine you will never go back to single CPU/core voluntarily).

Also R for Intel Macs comes with ptATLAS tuned for the Core Duo, so  
it uses both cores in parallel for BLAS operations. (Which may or may  
not be helpful depending on the problem at hand). Also note that  
there are ways to parallelize computations in R as well (c.f. snow  
package).

Cheers,
Simon