[R] speed?

[Liaw, Andy]

You (and your colleague) might want to have a look at
http://www.sciviews.org/benchmark/.  It's a bit dated,
but still may be a good starting point.

Some months ago some one asked about working on getting
R to use the GPU for computation on the R-devel list.
Don't know if anything came of it.

Cheers,
Andy 

From: ivo welch
> 
> dear R wizards:
> 
> while extolling the virtues of R, one of my young 
> econometrics colleagues told me that he still wants to run ox 
> because [a] his code is written in it (good reason); [b] 
> because ox seems to be faster than R in most benchmarks (huh?).
> 
> this got me to wonder.  language speed can't matter much, so 
> it must be mostly the underlying matrix algebra by now.  I 
> presume that nowadays most of the plain matrix operation 
> speed depends primarily on which hardware features the 
> library accesses.  (The basic algorithms aren't so different, 
> so even though the algorithm may have mattered a long time 
> ago, they are probably pretty similar nowadays. hmmm...maybe 
> matrix inversion still is different, but multiplication and 
> adding should not be.)
> 
> On x86 architecture, I believe there is a hierarchy in terms 
> of raw processing power:  FPU < SSE* < GPU.
> 
> is it even possible to use the GPU now for math processing 
> (linux or windows), and specifically in R?
> 
> assuming I compile everything with the proper SSE flags and atlas, is
> SSE* fully taken advantage of?
> 
> regards,
> 
> /ivo
> 
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