Dear R-help:
Has anyone tried using R on the the AMD Opteron in either 64- or 32-bit
mode? If so, any good/bad experiences, comments, etc? We are considering
getting this hardware, and would like to know if R can run smoothly on such
a beast. Any comment much appreciated.
Best,
Andy
Andy Liaw, PhD
Biometrics Research PO Box 2000, RY33-300
Merck Research Labs Rahway, NJ 07065
mailto:andy_liaw at merck.com <mailto:andy_liaw at merck.com>
732-594-0820
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Notice: This e-mail message, together with any attachments,...{{dropped}}
I've had a chance to build R-devel on one running SuSE (not sure which release). confugure set things up for a 64-bit build that passed all tests. The base tests ran about 25% faster on the 1.4GHz opteron than a2GHz Xeon. That's as much as I know at this point. luke On Tue, 26 Aug 2003, Liaw, Andy wrote:> Dear R-help: > > Has anyone tried using R on the the AMD Opteron in either 64- or 32-bit > mode? If so, any good/bad experiences, comments, etc? We are considering > getting this hardware, and would like to know if R can run smoothly on such > a beast. Any comment much appreciated. > > Best, > Andy > > Andy Liaw, PhD > Biometrics Research PO Box 2000, RY33-300 > Merck Research Labs Rahway, NJ 07065 > mailto:andy_liaw at merck.com <mailto:andy_liaw at merck.com> 732-594-0820 > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Notice: This e-mail message, together with any attachments,...{{dropped}} > > ______________________________________________ > R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list > https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help >-- Luke Tierney University of Iowa Phone: 319-335-3386 Department of Statistics and Fax: 319-335-3017 Actuarial Science 241 Schaeffer Hall email: luke at stat.uiowa.edu Iowa City, IA 52242 WWW: http://www.stat.uiowa.edu
On Tue, Aug 26, 2003 at 03:17:19PM -0400, Liaw, Andy wrote:> Has anyone tried using R on the the AMD Opteron in either 64- or 32-bit > mode? If so, any good/bad experiences, comments, etc? We are considering > getting this hardware, and would like to know if R can run smoothly on such > a beast. Any comment much appreciated.http://buildd.debian.org/build.php?&pkg=r-base&arch=ia64&file=log has logs of R builds on ia64 since Nov 2001, incl. the outcome of make check. We do not run the torture tests -- though I guess we could on some of the beefier hardware such as ia64. Dirk -- Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others. -- Groucho Marx
Thanks to all (and especially Prof. Tierney) for the response. The box we are considering will spend probably over 90% of CPU time in R, so it's comforting to know that R compiles and pass all the test (at least once) on such platform. (I switched my attention from Itanium to Opteron when I read that Itanium is slower than P4 for number crunching...) Best, Andy> From: Luke Tierney [mailto:luke at stat.uiowa.edu] > > On 26 Aug 2003, Peter Dalgaard BSA wrote: > > > Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org> writes: > > > > > On Tue, Aug 26, 2003 at 03:17:19PM -0400, Liaw, Andy wrote: > > > > Has anyone tried using R on the the AMD Opteron in > either 64- or > > > > 32-bit mode? If so, any good/bad experiences, > comments, etc? We > > > > are considering getting this hardware, and would like > to know if R > > > > can run smoothly on such a beast. Any comment much appreciated. > > > > > > http://buildd.debian.org/build.php?&pkg=r-base&arch=ia64&file=log > > > > > > has logs of R builds on ia64 since Nov 2001, incl. the outcome of > > > make check. We do not run the torture tests -- though I guess we > > > could on some of the beefier hardware such as ia64. > > > > I don't think that's quite the same beast, though. Opterons are the > > "x86-64" (or amd64) architecture and ia64 is Intel's, aka Itanium. > > Debian appears to be just warming up to including this > architecture: > > > http://lists.debian.org/debian-x86-> 64/2003/debian-x86-64-200308/thread > > s.html > > whereas they have had ia64 out for a while. > > > > SuSE has an Opteron option and Luke said he tried it. Apparently it > > has a functioning 64-bit compiler toolchain - I weren't > sure earlier > > whether they were just running a 64bit kernel and 32bit > applications, > > but when Luke says so, I believe it... > > > > I wasn't sure either, especially about default settings, but > 'file' says > > luke/R> file bin/R.bin > bin/R.bin: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, AMD x86-64, version 1 > (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), not stripped > > and in R > > > Sys.info()["machine"] > machine > "x86_64" > > .Machine$sizeof.pointer > [1] 8 > > So it looks like a functional 64-bit setup so far. > > luke > > -- > Luke Tierney > University of Iowa Phone: 319-335-3386 > Department of Statistics and Fax: 319-335-3017 > Actuarial Science > 241 Schaeffer Hall email: luke at stat.uiowa.edu > Iowa City, IA 52242 WWW: http://www.stat.uiowa.edu > >------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Notice: This e-mail message, together with any attachments,...{{dropped}}
I use R on a dual Opteron running SuSE Enterprise version 8 (amd-64). It compiles without complaint using gcc-3.3 (64bit)---all of the tests are successful and my personal test code performs well. The performance is rather good. I could NOT get R to compile using the Portland Group compilers. Doing realistic benchmarks is very hard. But in production the machine is *much* nicer to work with than any Intel machine I've worked on (for a similar price---i.e., excluding Itaniums). The Opteron is made to be a server chip and this really shows in server related tasks, such as multiple processes and process which require a lot of RAM or do a lot of I/O. Cheers, Jas. =====================================Jasjeet S. Sekhon Assistant Professor Harvard University Center for Basic Research in the Social Sciences jsekhon at fas.harvard.edu http://jsekhon.fas.harvard.edu/ Office: 617.496.2426 Fax: 617.496.5149 =====================================>Dear R-help: > >Has anyone tried using R on the the AMD Opteron in either 64- or 32-bit >mode? If so, any good/bad experiences, comments, etc? We are considering >getting this hardware, and would like to know if R can run smoothly on such >a beast. Any comment much appreciated. > >Best, >Andy > >Andy Liaw, PhD >Biometrics Research PO Box 2000, RY33-300 >Merck Research Labs Rahway, NJ 07065 >mailto:andy_liaw at merck.com <mailto:andy_liaw at merck.com> >732-594-0820
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