Tag: windoes

Running R on an Amazon EC2 has following benefits-

1) Elastic Memory and Number of Processors for heavy computation
2) Affordable micro instances for smaller datasets (2 cents per hour for Unix to 3 cents per hour).
3) An easy to use interface console for managing datasets as well as processes

Running R on an Amazon EC2 on Windows Instance has following additional benefits-

1) Remote Desktop makes operation of R very easy
2) 64 Bit R can be used
3) You can also use your evaluation of Revolution R Enterprise (which is free to academics) and quite inexpensive for enterprise software for corporates.

You can thus combine R GUIs (like Rattle , R Cmdr or Deducer based upon your need for statistical analysis, data mining or graphical analysis) , with 64 Bit OS, and Revolution’s REvoScaler Package to manage huge huge datasets at a very easy to use analytics solution.

Pricing-for Computation on EC2

Standard On-Demand Instances	Linux/UNIX Usage	Windows Usage
Small (Default)	$0.085 per hour	$0.12 per hour
Large	$0.34 per hour	$0.48 per hour
Extra Large	$0.68 per hour	$0.96 per hour
Micro On-Demand Instances	Linux/UNIX Usage	Windows Usage
Micro	$0.02 per hour	$0.03 per hour
High-Memory On-Demand Instances
Extra Large	$0.50 per hour	$0.62 per hour
Double Extra Large	$1.00 per hour	$1.24 per hour
Quadruple Extra Large	$2.00 per hour	$2.48 per hour
High-CPU On-Demand Instances
Medium	$0.17 per hour	$0.29 per hour
Extra Large	$0.68 per hour	$1.16 per hour
Cluster Compute Instances
Quadruple Extra Large	$1.60 per hour	N/A*
* Windows is not currently available for Cluster Compute Instances.

Amazon EBS Volumes- To store data $0.10 per GB-month of provisioned storage $0.10 per 1 million I/O requests Amazon EBS Snapshots to Amazon S3 (priced the same as Amazon S3) $0.15 per GB-month of data stored $0.01 per 1,000 PUT requests (when saving a snapshot) $0.01 per 10,000 GET requests (when loading a snapshot)

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing Other costs are optional to your needs

Based on the above- I set out to try and create a how-to DIY for running R (and RevolutionR on 64bit Windows on EC2)

1) Logon to https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/home

2) Launch Windows Instance

Left Margin-AMI-

Top Windows – Select Windows 64 AMI

(note if you select SQL Server it will cost you extra)

Then go through the following steps and launch instance

Note the new password generated- this is your Remote Desktop Password.

Click on the .rdp file (or Shortcut file created earlier)- It will connect to your Windows instance.

Enter the new  generated password in Remote Desktop

• Login

This looks like a new clean machine with just Windows OS installed on it.

Install Chrome (or any other browser) if you do not use Internet Explorer
Install Acrobat Reader (for documentation), Revolution R Enterprise~ 490 mb (it will automatically ask to install the .NET framework-4 files) and /or R

Install packages (I recommend installing R Commander, Rattle and Deducer). Apart from the fact that these GUIs are quite complimentary- they also will install almost all main packages that you need for analysis (as their dependencies) Revolution R installs parallel programming packages by default.

If you want to save your files for working later, you can make a snapshot (go to amazon console-ec2- left margin- ABS -Snapshot- you will see an attached memory (green light)- click on create snapshot to save your files for working later
If you want to use my Windows snapshot you can work on it , just when you start your Amazon Ec2 you can click on snapshots and enter details (see snapshot name below)  for making a copy or working on it for exploring either 64 bit R, or multi core cloud computing  or just trying out Revolution R’s new packages  for academic purposes.