R devel - Aug 2005 - 64 bit R for Windows

I am assisting in the purchase of 64-bit Windows XP system for researchers who
run R. These systems will have AMD Opteron processors and at least 4GB of RAM.
I'd appreciate advice on whether there is a working version of R that can
take full advantage of such systems.

Milton F. L?pez 
IT Guy
Inter-American Tuna Commission (IATTC)
8604 La Jolla Shores Drive 
La Jolla, CA 92037 
Tel: (858) 546-7041, Fax: (858) 546-7133 
email: mlopez at iattc.org
Web: http://www.iattc.org

Milton Lopez wrote:
> I am assisting in the purchase of 64-bit Windows XP system for researchers
who run R. These systems will have AMD Opteron processors and at least 4GB of
RAM. I'd appreciate advice on whether there is a working version of R that
can take full advantage of such systems.
No, there are no 64 bit Windows versions yet.  You'll need to install 
some 64 bit version of Linux on those machines to take full advantage of 
the chips.

Duncan Murdoch

Duncan:

Thanks for your reply. Not being a part of the R world and having to assist with
these purchases, I have to ask what "not yet" means. I realize that
this is a difficult question to answer even for commercial software, but I am
hoping you or someone else on the list may shed some additional light on the
subject.

Thanks in advance.

Milton F. L?pez 
IT Guy
Inter-American Tuna Commission (IATTC)
8604 La Jolla Shores Drive 
La Jolla, CA 92037 
Tel: (858) 546-7041, Fax: (858) 546-7133 
mlopez at iattc.org 
http://www.iattc.org

-----Original Message-----
From: Duncan Murdoch [mailto:murdoch at stats.uwo.ca] 
Sent: Tuesday, August 30, 2005 5:39 PM
To: Milton Lopez
Cc: r-devel at r-project.org
Subject: Re: [Rd] 64 bit R for Windows

Milton Lopez wrote:
> I am assisting in the purchase of 64-bit Windows XP system for researchers
who run R. These systems will have AMD Opteron processors and at least 4GB of
RAM. I'd appreciate advice on whether there is a working version of R that
can take full advantage of such systems.
No, there are no 64 bit Windows versions yet.  You'll need to install 
some 64 bit version of Linux on those machines to take full advantage of 
the chips.

Duncan Murdoch

I appreciate the update. We will consider using Linux, which leads me to
one more question: what is the maximum RAM that R can use on each
platform (Linux and Windows)?

Thanks again for your prompt responses.


M.

-----Original Message-----
From: Luke Tierney [mailto:luke at stat.uiowa.edu] 
Sent: Wednesday, August 31, 2005 6:04 PM
To: Duncan Murdoch
Cc: Milton Lopez; r-devel at r-project.org
Subject: Re: [Rd] 64 bit R for Windows

On Wed, 31 Aug 2005, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> I would say it will be at least a year, and most likely longer.  The
> tools used to build R haven't been ported to 64 bit Windows yet.
After
> those are done (by the MinGW project, not us), we'll need someone with
a
> 64 bit Windows machine to handle builds there.
>
> Duncan Murdoch
An additional factor is that MinGW will almost certainly follow the MS
idea that long's are 4 bytes even under Win64, unlike what every other
64-bit OS does.  It will take a fair bit of time and someonw with the
motivation to do so to sort out the consequences (which may not be
very great but even establishing that may be non-trivial).

luke