REvolution Computing’s enhanced distribution of R, REvolution R, has been available for free download from our website for Windows and MacOS for over a year now, and has been used by thousands of R users for high-performance statistical data analysis. Soon, we’ll be expanding our free distributions to Ubuntu Linux, with the release of REvolution R 3.0.
Like the Windows and MacOS versions, REvolution R 3.0 for Ubuntu Linux includes performance enhancements that make common mathematical operations (like matrix multiplication and decomposition) faster than in regular R. These optimized math libraries are also multi-threaded, so if you’re using a multi-CPU or multi-core workstation or laptop, REvolution R will use all available CPUs for many mathematical operations.
REvolution R 3.0 also features new parallel programming tools for R, so you can write loops in R which run faster by using multiple CPUs simultaneously. The new “foreach” function acts as a replacement for the “for” loop and function like “lapply”, while the “doMC” function enabled multiple iterations of the loop to run simultaneously.
REvolution R 3.0 is 100% compatible with the most recent version of R (R 2.9.2), so all the scripts and packages you currently use with R will produce exactly the same results in REvolution R 3.0 (although they may take less time to run).
When the new 9.10 release of Ubuntu Linux (codenamed “Karmic Koala”) is released on October 29, REvolution R will be immediately available as a download from the Ubuntu repositories. (If you’re already using the Karmic beta release, it’s available right now.) You can install REvolution R for Ubuntu by entering the following command:
sudo apt-get install revolution-r
If you already have R installed in Ubuntu (or only install the r-base-core package), when you upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10 you’ll see the following message when starting R:
REvolution R enhancements not installed. For improved
performance and other extensions: apt-get install revolution-r
[Some technical information for Ubuntu junkies: the “revolution-r” package builds on the “r-base-core” package so that they can both share other R-related package dependencies (like all the CRAN packages), which saves time for the volunteer maintainers of the upstream packages. Other than the message above, the r-base-core package is otherwise unmodified in 9.10, and if you wish you can suppress that message by modifying the Rprofile.site file.]
We’re very excited to be expanding the supported platforms of REvolution R to Ubuntu Linux, and we hope that the performance improvements and parallel computing tools make R even better for many users. Thanks go to our friends at Canonical for helping us introduce REvolution R to Ubuntu, and special thanks go to Debian developer and R contributor Dirk Eddelbuettel for invaluable technical assistance in creating and submitting the REvolution R packages for Ubuntu.
By the way, if you have any questions about using any of the REvolution R distributions, don’t forget you can always ask questions in our REvolution R forums where other REvolution R users and our technical staff are ready to help.
