Recently I posted to this list with a question about using the Intel 10.1 compilers in building R and one response was basically, "why in the heck would you want to do that?" The answer is that my sysadmin believes that there will be a performance boost with the Intel vs. Gnu compilers on our Linux cluster, of which I am one of many users. Wanting to be a good citizen and use my machine time wisely, I'd of course like to use right tool to build the most efficient installation of R and associated packages. BTW, we got R to compile nicely using the settings at the end of this post.
Looking back on previous posts, however, it seems that there is no consensus as to how to benchmark R. I realize such a task is not trivial, nor controversial, but does anyone have a set of time-consuming tasks that can be used to compare R installations? It would seem logical that such a benchmark would include sub-benchmarks on file access, interpreted intensive tasks, C intensive tasks, BLAS intensive tasks, etc. You developers know more about this than I do, but I know enough to realize that there won't be one simple answer. Nevertheless, I'd like to make my usage decisions on something rather than anedotal claims. So, does anyone know of a good benchmarking script or would be willing to contribute one? And here are the settings we used to compile R with Intel 10.1 compilers: ../configure --prefix=/N/u/mkimpel/R_HOME/R-patched/R-build \ --with-system-zlib=/usr/lib64 --with-system-bzlib=/usr/lib64 \ --with-mpi=/N/soft/linux-rhel4-x86_64/openmpi/1.2.5/intel-64 --with-tcltk \ --with-tcl-config=/N/soft/linux-rhel4-x86_64/tcl8.4.16/lib64/tclConfig.sh \ --with-tk-config=/N/soft/linux-rhel4-x86_64/tk8.4.16/lib64/tkConfig.sh \ --without-x --without-readline --without-iconv \ CC="/N/soft/linux-rhel4-x86_64/intel/cce/10.1.013/bin/icc" \ CFLAGS="-O3 -no-prec-div -unroll" \ F77="/N/soft/linux-rhel4-x86_64/intel/fce/10.1.013/bin/ifort" \ FFLAGS="-O3 -no-prec-div -unroll" \ CXX="/N/soft/linux-rhel4-x86_64/intel/cce/10.1.013/bin/icpc" \ CXXFLAGS="-O3 -no-prec-div -unroll" \ FC="/N/soft/linux-rhel4-x86_64/intel/fce/10.1.013/bin/ifort" \ FCFLAGS="-O3 -no-prec-div -unroll" \ OBJC="/N/soft/linux-rhel4-x86_64/intel/cce/10.1.013/bin/icc" \ OBJCFLAGS="-O3 -no-prec-div -unroll" \ --disable-R-profiling --disable-memory-profiling ## make all make install Mark -- Mark W. Kimpel MD ** Neuroinformatics ** Dept. of Psychiatry Indiana University School of Medicine 15032 Hunter Court, Westfield, IN 46074 (317) 490-5129 Work, & Mobile & VoiceMail (317) 663-0513 Home (no voice mail please) ****************************************************************** [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel