[R] Hardware Suggestions

[Peter Dalgaard]

"Jon Dressel" <jdressel at surromed.com> writes:

> We are currently running R under Windows 2000 on a server box
> running with 2 1.2 GHZ Intel Pentium III Processors. We would like
> to run this on a new computer running Linux and receive a
> significant speed increase over our current implementation. Could
> anyone provide some suggestions for a fast 64 BIT Intel based
> processor computer with a recommendation for memory and
> speed/type/number of processors. Also which version of R would
> install "out-of-the-box" easily on this computer and what version of
> Linux should be used? Thanks in advance for any help.

(I assume "Intel" also means AMD?)

People seem quite happy with dual and quad Opterons (and there are
dual-core chips coming up soon, I hear), but you do need to do your
homework, since there have been trouble with some chipsets/BIOSes in
large-memory configurations, and there are not all that many people
using the high-end stuff. Check out the archives of the x86_64 mailing
lists for the popular Linux distributions.

Distribution-wise Fedora Core and SuSE both work nicely and R has been
tested on both with no issues that I can think of. There's an RPM up
for FC3, but it's not a big hassle to build from source and you need
most of the build tools in place to install CRAN packages anyway.


-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907