[R-SIG-Mac] Suggested New Mac for Heavy R Use

Tue Mar 11 18:20:20 CET 2014

On 11/03/2014 16:40, Simon Urbanek wrote:
> On Mar 11, 2014, at 10:35 AM, Stephen B. Cox <myrddincox at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Anyone had any experience running fairly intensive analysis on a new
>> MacPro?  I am looking to upgrade my desktop, and 80% of my time is spent in
>> RStudio/Latex/Sweave... working primarily with microbiome analysis (large
>> datasets).  Been considering a new MacPro, but I am a little hesitant
>> about; a) moving my desktop to Mac,

'large datasets' are in the eye of the beholder: you would need to 
quantify that.

> That is typically a big plus - especially if you use Windows. It is in fact probably the single major reason to pick a MacPro today, although I would probably rather get an iMac in that case.
>
>
>> and b) whether the MacPro performance will be worth the cost (it almost seems geared more towards graphics than anything else).
>>
>
> I don’t have any hands-on experience with the new MacPro but its specs are underwhelming. It is an experiment - if you can leverage the GPUs for computing, then it may be worth it, but it’s still quite hard to do so. With AMD you’e essentially stuck with OpenCL and other than core support so you can write your own kernels, there is very little else in R to leverage that. Today, you’re much better off getting a server/workstation which you can load with RAM and more cores for computing for the same price (running Linux, obviously, you really don’t want to do computing on Windows with R) - and use your desktop/laptop just to access its computing power.

>> For some background - I have worked on Macs for years, but moved my main work desktop to Windows about 2 years ago.  I also do quite a bit of work in QIIME - which can be done on the mac (not the PC) and is both RAM and CPU intensive... so, I can benefit from multiple cores, large RAM, etc.  My 2011 MacBook Pro seems extremely sluggish at this point when running basic tasks (probably need to do a fresh OS install),
>
> If you encounter sluggishness in OS X is pretty much always a disk issue. Wipe the disk or even better put in a SSD - it’s more than worth it - a whole different world.

Or a 'fusion' drive in an iMac, which gives you enough SSD advantage 
unless you really use repeatedly a lot of disc space (and works well for 
me).  The MacPro's I/O benchmarks are impressive, but you would need to 
be able to generate data at those speeds to make use of them.

> Cheers,
> Simon
>
>
>> but the Windows machine has
>> never slowed down.  This has added to some of my hesitation.
>>
>> Anyone have opinions/experience using R on the new MacPro?
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 1:05 PM, Simon Urbanek
>> <simon.urbanek at r-project.org>wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> On Mar 10, 2014, at 12:43 PM, Nick <franken_beans2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Good afternoon, I am looking at buying my first Mac and thought i'd ask
>>> for advice for what I should get. I have it down to the two models below
>>> (but am open to realistic suggestions).
>>>>
>>>> I will primarily be using R for machine learning packages, and the data
>>> sets are very large. If any other specs are needed let me know.
>>>>
>>>
>>> "data sets are very large' - well, the machines listed below are certainly
>>> not suitable to run anything on large data ;) so you may want to quantify
>>> what you mean here. You want as much RAM as possible for large data since
>>> that is the single item that will cause huge drop-off in performance when
>>> exhausted and R certainly can take quite a bit of memory if this is really
>>> your only machine to run computing on. Note that in modern Apple laptops
>>> you cannot add more memory later, so this is rather important factor.
>>>
>>> Given a choice of the two MacBook Air is not a computing machine - it's
>>> optimized for power consumption, not speed, so the only reason to go for it
>>> is if you're looking for a light notebook and don't care about the
>>> computing speed as much.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Simon
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> Thanks in advance.
>>>>
>>>> 13-inch MacBook Air ($1,349)
>>>> 1.7GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.3GHz
>>>> 8GB 1600MHz LPDDR3 SDRAM
>>>> 128GB Flash Storage
>>>>
>>>> 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina ($1,399.00)
>>>> 2.4GHz Dual-core Intel Core i5, Turbo Boost up to 2.9GHz
>>>> 8GB 1600MHz DDR3L SDRAM
>>>> 128GB PCIe-based Flash Storage
>>>>       [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>>>
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>>>
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>>
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>>
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>
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-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
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