R

I recently updated my set-up, and because I use a High-Performance cluster from my University (kudos to avakas) to run various simulations and analyses, I have MPI and Rmpi installed on my laptop in order to test my scripts before submitting them to the big cluster. So I installed openmpi from homebrew very easily: brew update brew install open-mpi But then I had extensive trouble installing the Rmpi package…

This is a quick technical post, that is as much about disseminating the information as putting it in a place where I can find it again in the future. I have been trying to use openMP in an R package that I am currently developing. openMP is supported by the popular gcc compiler. However, OS-X Xcode now ships with a clang compiler that does not support openMP. So first one needs to install gcc (from homebrew for instance).

At Bordeaux University, we are quite lucky. I mean as computational consumers. Indeed, we have access to a big CPU cluster, a mesocenter that has been build for all the researchers in the Aquitaine area (in the south west of France). And it’s a big one. It’s named avakas, and it has brought my Ph.D. computational projects to an other scale ! But for a few month now, I have also been granted access (for free as a I work in a national research agency) to a new kind of big computer: a net of heaters.

At the end of august 2013, I was lucky enough to attend the Rencontres des jeunes statisticiens (young statisticians meeting). It is organised every other year by the Société Française de Statistique (French Statistical Society). It was thrilling to meet all these fellow statisticians in the making! A lot of the talks were very interesting. In particular, one made me think of a recent post from Roger Peng on the famous Simply Statistics blog.

Last week, a colleague draw my attention on this new log files from the Rstudio cloud CRAN mirror, through a post from Tal Galili. This CRAN mirror is a little different, as it uses Amazon CloudFront to deliver the downloads rapidly from a server near you, wherever that is. But what’s really great about it, is the availability of those log files, that have been recording every package download since October 2012, daily!