[R] My surprising experience in trying out REvolution's R

David M Smith david at revolution-computing.com
Fri Apr 24 00:05:04 CEST 2009


We've taken a look at this in a bit more detail; it's a very
interesting example.  Although the code uses several functions that
exploit the parallel processing in REvolution R (notably %*% and
chol), this was one of those situations where the overheads of
threading pretty much balanced any performance gains: the individual
matrices for the operations were too small.

For some examples where the performance gains do show, see:
http://www.revolution-computing.com/products/r-performance.php

A more promising avenue for speeding up this code lies in
parallelizing the outer for(i in 1:200) loop...

# David Smith

On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 9:26 AM, Jason Liao <JLIAO at hes.hmc.psu.edu> wrote:
> I care a lot about R's speed. So I decided to give REvolution's R
> (http://revolution-computing.com/) a try, which bills itself as an
> optimized R. Note that I used the free version.
>
> My machine is a Intel core 2 duo under Windows XP professional. The code
> I run is in the end of this post.
>
> First, the regular R 1.9. It takes 2 minutes and 6 seconds, CPU usage
> 50%
>
> Next, REvolution's R. It takes 2 minutes and 10 seconds, CPU usage 100%.
>
>
> In other words, REvolution's R consumes double the CPU with slightly
> less speed.
>
> The above has been replicated a few times (as a statistician of course).
>
>
> Anyone has any insight on this? Anyway, my high hope was dashed.


-- 
David M Smith <david at revolution-computing.com>
Director of Community, REvolution Computing www.revolution-computing.com
Tel: +1 (206) 577-4778 x3203 (San Francisco, USA)

Check out our upcoming events schedule at www.revolution-computing.com/events




More information about the R-help mailing list