[R] Reasons to Use R

[Lorenzo Isella]

Dear All,
The institute I work for is organizing an internal workshop for High
Performance Computing (HPC).
I am planning to attend it and talk a bit about fluid dynamics, but
there is also quite a lot of interest devoted to data post-processing
and management of huge data sets.
A lot of people are interested in image processing/pattern recognition
and statistic applied to geography/ecology, but I would like not to
post this on too many lists.
The final aim of the workshop is  understanding hardware requirements
and drafting a list of the equipment we would like to buy. I think
this could be the venue to talk about R as well.
Therefore, even if it is not exactly a typical mailing list question,
I would like to have suggestions about where to collect info about:
(1)Institutions (not only academia) using R
(2)Hardware requirements, possibly benchmarks
(3)R & clusters, R & multiple CPU machines, R performance on different hardware.
(4)finally, a list of the advantages for using R over commercial
statistical packages. The money-saving in itself is not a reason good
enough and some people are scared by the lack of professional support,
though this mailing list is simply wonderful.

Kind Regards

Lorenzo Isella