Robert Grossman of the Open Data Group has posted a useful set of tips for running R under Amazon's EC2 service. This is a quick and cost-effective way of creating instances of a large number of machines running R. You might want to do this for parallel computing in R when you don't have access to your own cluster, or when using R as the back-end for a web-based application and you're not sure how many servers you'll need (EC2 allows you to dynamically scale the hardware to the demand).
The Open Data Group has helpfully provided a virtual machine image (called an "AMI") including R (and I believe some of the default AMIs provided by Amazon include R, too). You can also create custom AMIs with REvolution R Enterprise installed, which allows you to take advantage of ParallelR on large EC2 clusters. Creating custom AMI's is pretty easy (especially if you use a provided image as a starting point), and you're probably going to need to create one in any case if you want to use your own packages. (If you do need to create a custom AMI, REvolution's services group can help.)
From Data to Decisions: Running R on Amazon's EC2
For those reading this fantastic post but not interested in setting up / maintaining their own EC2 instances, Monkey Analytics (http://www.monkeyanalytics.com) recently added support for R in our cloud based math / science computation web app. We're pretty excited about this (it was the #1 requested user feature post-launch).
Stop by and check us out!
~Francesca Moyse | Founder, Monkey Analytics | francesca@monkeyanalytics.com
Posted by: Francesca Moyse | September 01, 2009 at 18:54