R performance optimization

The blog The Average Investor’s Blog » R posted a nice report about accelerating a default Debian R installation and added some details about his benchmarks in the comment section:

• http://theaverageinvestor.wordpress.com/2011/07/01/low-hanging-r-optimizations-on-ubuntu
• Benchmark details: https://www.r-bloggers.com/faster-r-through-better-blas/

In these posts loading optimized libraries gives a five-fold performance improvement. It would be great to get these performance improvements into relation to the benchmark results in the Heuristic Andrew blog: http://heuristically.wordpress.com/2011/06/27/benchmarking-r-revolution-r-and-hyperthreading-for-data-mining/ This post compared an R installation with and without HyperThreading with the Revolution R version. In this blog post Revolution R was about 37% faster than the default R installation. It still needs to be clarified whether we can achieve the same performance as Revolution R by very simple optimization of R installations? Cloudnumbers.com provides researchers and companies with the resources to perform high performance calculations in the cloud. Therefore, it is one of your main issues to provide applications with the best performance. We are currently testing different installation settings to provide you with the fastest R installation in the Cloud (keep on following our blog for more details). Benchmarking R performance is all the time a critical issue. Due to the diversity of R applications the performance depends on many features. Please post some comments about your favorite R benchmark. Register and test at cloudnumbers.com for free now!