Robert McFadden writes: >Dear R Users, >I hope that there is someone who has an experience >with a problem that I >describe below and will help me. >I must buy new desktop computer and I'm wondering >which processor to choose >if my only aim is to speed up R. I would like to >reduce a simulation time - >sometimes it takes days. I consider buying one of >them (I'm working under >Win XP 32 bit): >1. Intel Core2 Duo E6700 2.67 GHz >2. Dual-Core Intel Xeon processor 3070 - 2,66 GHz >3. AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ >Or simple Pentium 4? > >I'm very confused because I'm not sure whether R >takes advantage dual-core >or not. If not, probably Athlon would be better, >wouldn't be? >I would appreciate any help. >Rob
Hi Robert, Let me suggest you a "dirty" solution - if simulations take days and you must run them many times I would have rewriten them, let say, in C. I had a program in Matlab which took more than an hour to run and I had to run it many times, so I usually prepared a few runs, started them in the evening before leaving the office and got the results next morning. After a while I have re-written it in C (this took me a few days) and got a spead-up factor of about 100, so that now the run took just a few minutes! Languages like R and Matlab are extreemely convenient but if performance is a very important issue you shoul use C, Fortran, C++, etc. Regards, Moshe Olshansky. ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch 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.