[R] speed?

[Roger D. Peng]

Running on 64-bit per se does not make things faster.  In fact, from my 
experience it sometimes makes things slower.  The advantage with 64-bit is the 
extra address space for storing things in memory.

Of course, today's 64-bit chips are all faster than recent 32-bit chips, so you 
will get a speed improvement, but only because you're getting a better chip.

-roger

Kerpel, John wrote:
> The benchmark report is good stuff - I've been wondering about these
> speed issues recently myself.
> 
> Has anyone tried something similar on 64-bit Linux or other OS?  I'm
> contemplating switching to 64-bit Linux if I'll get some dramatic cycle
> time improvements.  Anyone have any experience with this?
> 
> Best,
> 
> John
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch
> [mailto:r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of Liaw, Andy
> Sent: Friday, June 02, 2006 10:01 AM
> To: ivo welch; r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: Re: [R] speed?
> 
> 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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> 
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-- 
Roger D. Peng  |  http://www.biostat.jhsph.edu/~rpeng/