CE,

Sorry for the delay.  I haven't installed any additional packages, so I don't 
know the answer to your question.  Let me look into it and get back to you.

Regards,
Jonathan Anspach
Sr. Software Engineer
Intel Corp.
jonathan.p.ansp...@intel.com
713-751-9460


-----Original Message-----
From: ce [mailto:zadi...@excite.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, March 05, 2014 8:54 PM
To: r-help@r-project.org; Anspach, Jonathan P
Subject: Re: [R] Building R for better performance


Hi Jonathan,

I think most people would be interested in such a tool, because main complaint 
of R is its slowness for some operations and big data.
Even thought the intel software is paying , I could install it free since I am 
not selling any software and work for non-profit. 
I compiled successfully on my opensuse.. My question is : after make install , 
do I need to give special options to install.packages or they will be complied 
with icc automatically ?

Regards
CE


-----Original Message-----
From: "Anspach, Jonathan P" [jonathan.p.ansp...@intel.com]
Date: 03/05/2014 12:28 AM
To: "r-help@r-project.org" <r-help@r-project.org>
Subject: [R] Building R for better performance

Greetings,

I'm a software engineer with Intel.  Recently I've been investigating R 
performance on Intel Xeon and Xeon Phi processors and RH Linux.  I've also 
compared the performance of R built with the Intel compilers and Intel Math 
Kernel Library to a "default" build (no config options) that uses the GNU 
compilers.  To my dismay, I've found that the GNU build always runs on a single 
CPU core, even during matrix operations.  The Intel build runs matrix 
operations on multiple cores, so it is much faster on those operations.  
Running the benchmark-2.5 on a 24 core Xeon system, the Intel build is 13x 
faster than the GNU build (21 seconds vs 275 seconds).  Unfortunately, this 
advantage is not documented anywhere that I can see.

Building with the Intel tools is very easy.  Assuming the tools are installed 
in /opt/intel/composerxe, the process is simply (in bash shell):

$ . /opt/intel/composerxe/bin/compilervars.sh intel64 $ ./configure 
--with-blas="-L/opt/intel/composerxe/mkl/lib/intel64 -lmkl_intel_lp64 
-lmkl_intel_thread -lmkl_core -liomp5 -lpthread -lm" --with-lapack CC=icc 
CFLAGS=-O2 CXX=icpc CXXFLAGS=-O2 F77=ifort FFLAGS=-O2 FC=ifort FCFLAGS=-O2 $ 
make $ make check

My questions are:
1) Do most system admins and/or R installers know about this performance 
difference, and use the Intel tools to build R?
2) Can we add information on the advantage of building with the Intel tools, 
and how to do it, to the installation instructions and FAQ?

I can post my data if anyone is interested.

Thanks,
Jonathan Anspach
Sr. Software Engineer
Intel Corp.
jonathan.p.ansp...@intel.com
713-751-9460

______________________________________________
R-help@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.


______________________________________________
R-help@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.

Reply via email to