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.)
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
I obtained an academic license from you recently. If I create an AMI for personal use, could I install Revolutions R Enterprise in it? It would be very useful. Being able to run jobs in Amazon EC2, frees us from the limits of our own machines. I have a pretty good desktop, but it doesn't compare with the type of machines you can create in EC2.
Posted by: Carlos Quintanilla | August 01, 2010 at 20:53
Hi Carlos,
If you're using it under the terms of the academic license (i.e. for educational or research use) then you can install it on EC2. Let us know how it goes!
Posted by: David Smith | August 02, 2010 at 09:26
how can we install revolution analytics into amazon ec2 (i know this question is very lame)
Posted by: mohit khanna | December 01, 2012 at 06:59