R help - Mar 2004 - optimal hardware for computations in R?

Hi,

I am planning to buy a new PC for computing simulations in R under
Linux. I was searching the web/mailing list-archives for useful hints
about the "optimal" choice of hardware - surprisingly I found no
recent
topics.

As far as I know, R doesn't use threads, so I think that there should be
no benefit in choosing a dual-processor machine.

So the remaining affordable choices seems to be Athlon XP, Pentium 4,
Xeon or Athlon64/Opteron. Are there any R-related benchmarks or should
one simply look about the "standard" benchmark-results (SPEC, etc.)?
Any
hints or experiences would be appreciated!

Thanks in advance,

Amit

On Tue, 23 Mar 2004, Amit Ghosh wrote:
> I am planning to buy a new PC for computing simulations in R under
> Linux. I was searching the web/mailing list-archives for useful hints
> about the "optimal" choice of hardware - surprisingly I found no
recent
> topics.
Most of seem to be buying dual Opterons, not least so we can potentially 
access more than 4Gb.
> As far as I know, R doesn't use threads, so I think that there should
be
> no benefit in choosing a dual-processor machine.
It certainly can use a threaded BLAS.  You can also do two simulation runs 
simultaneously (and surely you will be doing more than one run?).
> So the remaining affordable choices seems to be Athlon XP, Pentium 4,
> Xeon or Athlon64/Opteron. Are there any R-related benchmarks or should
> one simply look about the "standard" benchmark-results (SPEC,
etc.)? Any
> hints or experiences would be appreciated!
It really does depend on what exactly your computations do.  There are R 
`benchmarks', but they are not typical tasks (for me, and probably for no 
one else).

I would buy either a dual Athlon MP or a dual Opteron, and not worry too
much about this -- anything you buy today will look slow next year, and
you are not likely to see differences as large as 2x on one processor.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

I thought there are quite a bit of evidence that Hyper-Threading may be more
of a debit than credit under many conditions.  Is that not so?  We have a
dual Xeon box running Linux, and we disabled the HT.

If the computing tasks will ever reach the 3GB limit on memory, the best
choice is still AMD64.  Even though we have 8GB on the dual Xeon, each
process is still limited to 3GB of RAM.  For our application, we'd get as
much RAM as possible, and not necessarily the fastest CPU.  The dual Opteron
244 we have is about 0%-15% faster than the dual 2.4GHz Xeon, depending on
the tasks.

Also, you can easily make use of dual CPUs with Luke's `snow' package.

Andy
> From: Paul Y. Peng
> 
> I recently ordered a computer which is intended to run both WindowsXP
> and Linux (of course both versions of R as well). Before placing the
> order, I discussed it with our system managers. They highly 
> recommanded
> a system with one P4 CPU with Intel's so called
"hyper-threading"
> technology over a system with two CPU's, and they claimed 
> that both OS's
> can take benefits from the "hyper-threading" technology. I
haven't got
> the machine yet and don't know how fast it is. At least this 
> is another
> option available.
> 
> Paul.
> 
> 
> Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> > On Tue, 23 Mar 2004, Amit Ghosh wrote:
> > 
> > 
> >>I am planning to buy a new PC for computing simulations in R under
> >>Linux. I was searching the web/mailing list-archives for 
> useful hints
> >>about the "optimal" choice of hardware - surprisingly I 
> found no recent
> >>topics.
> > 
> > 
> > Most of seem to be buying dual Opterons, not least so we 
> can potentially 
> > access more than 4Gb.
> > 
> > 
> >>As far as I know, R doesn't use threads, so I think that 
> there should be
> >>no benefit in choosing a dual-processor machine.
> > 
> > 
> > It certainly can use a threaded BLAS.  You can also do two 
> simulation runs 
> > simultaneously (and surely you will be doing more than one run?).
> > 
> > 
> >>So the remaining affordable choices seems to be Athlon XP, 
> Pentium 4,
> >>Xeon or Athlon64/Opteron. Are there any R-related 
> benchmarks or should
> >>one simply look about the "standard" benchmark-results 
> (SPEC, etc.)? Any
> >>hints or experiences would be appreciated!
> > 
> > 
> > It really does depend on what exactly your computations do. 
>  There are R 
> > `benchmarks', but they are not typical tasks (for me, and 
> probably for no 
> > one else).
> > 
> > I would buy either a dual Athlon MP or a dual Opteron, and 
> not worry too
> > much about this -- anything you buy today will look slow 
> next year, and
> > you are not likely to see differences as large as 2x on one 
> processor.
> >
> 
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