R help - Jun 2009 - parallel R?

Hi all,

Lots of big IT companies are renting out their computing facilities.
Amazon has one such service. In my understanding, this will
dramatically improve the speed of my R program -- currently the cross
validation and model selection part is the bottle neck. It take a few
days to just finish optimal parameter tuning via CV.

Could anybody shed some lights on this? Is it completely transparent
to move my R program to a rented parallel computing facility?

Moreover, at my PC level, I have a 4-core PC, is there anything we
could do in R to speed up my CV programs?

Thanks a lot!

On 26 June 2009 at 07:40, Michael wrote:
| Hi all,
| 
| Lots of big IT companies are renting out their computing facilities.
| Amazon has one such service. In my understanding, this will
| dramatically improve the speed of my R program -- currently the cross
| validation and model selection part is the bottle neck. It take a few
| days to just finish optimal parameter tuning via CV.
| 
| Could anybody shed some lights on this? Is it completely transparent
| to move my R program to a rented parallel computing facility?
| 
| Moreover, at my PC level, I have a 4-core PC, is there anything we
| could do in R to speed up my CV programs?

Try this link:   http://lmgtfy.com/?q=parallel+computing+with+R

A survey paper on parallel computing with R by Schmidberger et al will be
fortcoming shortly in Journal of Statistical Software -- that is at
http://jstatsoft.org and a Google query will lead to preprints.

Also note that R has a support site network called 'CRAN' which contains
so
called 'Task Views'. Amnong these you may find this one of interest:

   http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/HighPerformanceComputing.html

As to your initial question:  yes, people do use R on the Amazon service.

Dirk

-- 
Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.