December 2016
Intermediate to advanced
222 pages
5h 20m
English
Content preview from Efficient R Programming
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Chapter 8. Efficient Hardware
This chapter is odd for a book on R programming. It contains very little code, and yet the chapter has the potential to speed up your algorithms by orders of magnitude. This chapter considers the impact that your computer has on your time.
Your hardware is crucial. It will not only determine how fast you can solve your problem, but also whether you can even tackle the problem of interest. This is because everything is loaded in RAM. Of course, having a more powerful computer costs money. The goal is to help you decide whether the benefits of upgrading your hardware are worth that extra cost.
We begin this chapter with a background section on computer storage and memory and how it is measured. Then we consider individual computer components, and conclude with renting machines in the cloud.
Prerequisites
This chapter will focus on assessing your hardware and the benefit of upgrading. We will use the benchmarkme package to quantify the effect of changing your CPU.
library("benchmarkme")
Top Five Tips for Efficient Hardware
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Use the package benchmarkme to assess your CPU’s number-crunching ability; is it worth upgrading your hardware?
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If possible, add more RAM.
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Double-check that you have installed a 64-bit version of R.
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Cloud computing is a cost-effective way of obtaining more computer power.
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Solid-state drives typically won’t have much impact on the speed of your R code but will increase your overall productivity because I/0 is much faster. ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.