If you're writing C++ code and want to generate random numbers, you might not be aware that R provides an API to call the R RNG functionality directly. The Rcpp package's "syntactic sugar" feature makes this process easier, by automating the process of translating a subset of ordinary R code ... [Read more...]

Earlier this year data scientist Ryan Rosario gave a talk on parellel computing with R to the Los Angeles R User Group, and he recently made the slides from the talk available online. They're a great resource for anyone looking to make use of multi-processor systems a Hadoop based architechure ... [Read more...]

The June 2012 issue of the R Journal, the peer-reviewed open-journal about R packages and applications of R, is now available. This issue includes articles about: Efficiently calling C functions from R without the need for wrapper code Using clusters of Macs running Apple Xgrid for parallel distributed processing with R ... [Read more...]

I’ve just received an announcement from Michael Lang that packages BatchJobs and BatchExperiments have been added to the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN). From the announcement: The package BatchJobs implements the basic objects and procedu... [Read more...]

Erik Sigur, Information Technologist for the Department of Statistics and Probability at Michigan State University, writes at ReadWriteWeb about using Revolution R Enterprise to provide high-performance computation in R to the researchers in his department: Our search for a more effective version of R ultimately brought us to a product ... [Read more...]

Here is an interview with Kai Chew, Founder of Cloudstat. CloudStat is developing a cloud-based statistical platform to help researchers who want to make sense of data to do statistical analysis collaboratively with its high performance computing infra... [Read more...]

ConPA is an asset allocation application using the classic Markowitz approach. For the calculations the open-source statistical programming language R is used. R scripts are executed on cloudnumbers.com’s computer clusters in the Cloud and the results are displayed by ConPA frontend. ConPA allows to set the investment date ... [Read more...]

We're proud to announce the latest update to the enhanced, commercial-grade distribution of R, Revolution R Enterprise 5.0. With each new release, Revolution R Enterprise adds more capabilities to open-source R, to make R users more productive, to improve performance of R programs, to support Big Data analytics, and to provide ... [Read more...]

In view of open-source parallel computing with R this week presents a big step to the future. R 2.14.0 was released at October 31th, 2011. Now, R base ships with a parallel computing package called “parallel”.  library(parallel) It combines advantages of the packages multicore and snow and it contains support for ... [Read more...]

We introduced batch processing 3 weeks ago. Many people asked about differences and benefits of batch processing or interactive sessions. Lets start with the definitions: Batch Processing / Batch Jobs: Batch processing is the execution of a series of programs or only one task on a computer environment without manual intervention. All ... [Read more...]

This week we rolled out a new release at cloudnumbers.com which implements two new main features: cloudnumbers.com now supports Batch processing. Due to some changes in the architecture we were able to reduce our system requirements. In detail, we do not need that much open ports in your ... [Read more...]

Rcpp package co-author Dirk Eddelbuettel provides another case study in speeding up R code by rewriting repeatedly-called R code as inline C++ functions, using the classic Fibonacci recursion algorithm as an example. The speed gains here are impressive -- over 600x compared to native recursive R code -- but you ... [Read more...]

Today, programmers have to deal with multi-core and multi-computer technologies. Several people claim that software developers are far behind hardware technologies. My two favorite posts for this statement are Editor’s Desk: Software Lags Behind Hardware, But That’s a Good Thing A Hacker’s Craic -Why is software so ... [Read more...]

It was an exciting useR2011 conference at the University of Warwick, Coventry, UK. Thanks a lot to the local organizing and program committee for having this great conference. I enjoyed the variety of talks, the poster session and the conference dinner and everything within walking distance. In view of HPC ... [Read more...]

Very often scientists are worried about performance and security in cloud computing. Especially, when talking about High-Performance Computing (HPC) in the cloud it is a very important aspect to proof efficient calculation speed in the cloud. Cloud computing describes a new delivery model for IT services based on Internet protocols, ... [Read more...]

In a presentation at the JSM 2011 conference in Miami yesterday, R core member Luke Tierney revealed that the next major update to R, R 2.14, will feature improved speed when processing interpreted R code, thanks to standard use of the new byte compiler feature. The byte compiler was introduced with R 2.13, ... [Read more...]

Today, the AG Statistical Computing released the “Call for a Special Topic on Grid and Cloud Computing” in the Journal “Methods of Information in Medicine”. We are inviting submissions for a special topic of Methods of Information in Medicine on “Grid and Cloud Computing Methods in Biomedical Research“. This special ... [Read more...]

Today, cloud computing is used in many application areas from academic research to industry. Commercial cloud providers as Amazon Web Services (AWS) advertise the simple and fast access to cloud computing resources. Posts in different blogs proof that you can get your application running in the cloud, but it will ... [Read more...]

The blog Heuristically Andrew puts Revolution R through its paces by running some benchmarks versus open-source R for data mining applications. The benchmarks set out to answer the following question: I recently upgraded my notebook (where I often use R for data mining) and was faced with two questions: for ... [Read more...]

Who we are cloudnumbers.com provides researchers and companies with the resources to perform high performance calculations in the cloud. We help our customers to fight epidemics, develop highly advanced drugs and manage financial risk. Our aim is to change the way research collaboration is done today by bringing together ... [Read more...]