[R] What is the most cost effective hardware for R?

[Rich Shepard]

On Tue, 8 May 2012, Hugh Morgan wrote:

> Perhaps I have confused the issue. When I initially said "data points" I
> meant one stand alone analysis, not one piece of data. Each analysis point
> takes 1.5 seconds. I have not implemented running this over the whole
> dataset yet, but I would expect it to take about 5 to 10 hours. This is
> just about acceptable, but it would be better if this was quicker. As I
> say, the exact analysis method has not yet been determined, and if that
> was significantly more computationally intensive then that could be an
> issue.

   If I had to do what you write above, I would separate the data into
chunks; one for each core/CPU in my system. Then I would invoke R to run on
each core/CPU and have that instance process one data set. With sufficient
memory for each core/CPU the processing will occur in parallel and cut the
overall time by the number of instances running.

   You might want to turn up the air conditioning around the system 'cause
that CPU is going to be working hard.

Rich