To me there are big gorillas in the room and I need to know why I can not use them all.
• Testing for physical and logical cpus on Joe's MacBook Pro. Josephs-MacBook-Pro:~ josephgkunkel$ /usr/sbin/sysctl -n hw.physicalcpu 4 Josephs-MacBook-Pro:~ josephgkunkel$ /usr/sbin/sysctl -n hw.logicalcpu 8 Prior to about 2012 my multicore Macs would use all (physical) cores automagically in R. %*% was multicore automatically. A 24 hour heavy matrix calculation would take a little over 6 hours on a 4 core Mac. Then some problem with the BLAS library changed everything and colleague stats people and I got really mad that we could not do our calculations as fast in R. Many work-around libraries were devised which did not seem to be that useful for freewielding matrix operations. Then Revolution R seemed to solve the problem and patented(?) it. … but not for Macs. Recently they provided a free Mac version but using their R ‘open' version messes up my computer for updating the libraries I am addicted to using. My question after this appologeticlay long narrative is: Why has no satisfactory and transparent method for multicore use been available to CRAN R? Secondarily, how could our R open software system be hijacked by Revolution and now Microsoft? I would be pleased to know that there are colleagues out there who are similarly hoping for an R core solution within CRAN. I can do primitive matrix things faster with Julia, which is encouraging, but the libraries and flexability for me are not there yet. Joe -·. .· ·. .><((((º>·. .· ·. .><((((º>·. .· ·. .><((((º> .··.· >=- =º}}}}}>< Joseph G. Kunkel, Research Professor 112A Marine Science Center University of New England Biddeford ME 04005 http://www.bio.umass.edu/biology/kunkel/ _______________________________________________ R-SIG-Mac mailing list R-SIG-Mac@r-project.org https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac