Hello I am fortunate (or in really big trouble) in that the research group I work with will soon be receiving several high end dual quad core machines. We will use the Ubuntu OS on these. We intend to use this cluster for some extensive modeling applications. Our programming guru has demonstrated the ability to link much simpler machines to share CPUs and we purchased the new ones to take advantage of this option. We have also begun exploration of the R CUDA and J CUDA functionality to push the processes to the graphics CPU which greatly speeds up the numerical processing.
My question(s) to this group: 1) Which packages are suitable for parallel processing applications in R ? 2) Are these packages ready for prime time applications or are they developmental at this time? 3) Are we better off working in Java or C++ for the majority of this simulation work and linking to R for statistical analysis? 4) What are the pit falls, if any, that I need to be aware of ? 5) Can we take advantage of sharing the graphics CPU, via R CUDA, in a parallel distributed shared cluster of dedicated machines ? 6) Our statistical analysis and modeling applications address very large geographic issues. We generally work with 30-40 year daily time step data in a grided format. The grid is approximate 250 x 400 cells in extent, each representing approximately 500 meters x 500 meters. To this we a very large suite of ancillary information, both spatial and non-spatial, to simulate a variety of ecological state conditions. My question is - is this too large for R , given its use of memory? 7) I currently have a laptop with Ubuntu with R Version 2.6.2 (2008-02-08). What is the most recent R version for Ubuntu and what is the installation procedure ? These are just the initial questions that I'm sure to have. If these are being directed to the wrong help pages, I'm sorry to have taken your time. If you would be so kind as to direct me to the more appropriate help site I'd appreciate your assistance. Thanks in advance, Steve Steve Friedman Ph. D. Spatial Statistical Analyst Everglades and Dry Tortugas National Park 950 N Krome Ave (3rd Floor) Homestead, Florida 33034 steve_fried...@nps.gov Office (305) 224 - 4282 Fax (305) 224 - 4147 ______________________________________________ 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.