R and Cloud Computing

Here is a good site for using R for cloud computing. It is called Biocep.

http://biocep-distrib.r-forge.r-project.org/

Biocep is a general unified open source Java solution for integrating and virtualizing the access to R engines/servers. It aims to become a federative user-friendly computational e-platform for research, finance and education. The Biocep virtual workbench provides a framework enabling the connection of all the elements of a computational environment:

• 1. The computational resource (whether it is a local machine, a cluster, a grid or a cloud server) via a simple URL.
• 2. The computational components via the import of R packages.
• 3. The GUIs via the import of plugins from repositories or the design of new views with a drag-and-drop GUI editor.

An example is

A Biocep based R virtualization infrastructure has been successfully deployed on the British National Grid Service, demonstrating its usability and usefulness for researchers.

 

 

An additional package is RWebservices.

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http://www.bioconductor.org/packages/2.3/bioc/html/RWebServices.html

Expose R functions as web services through Java/Axis/Apache

This package provides mechanisms for automatic function prototyping and exposure of R functionality in a web services environment.

Using R on a cloud computer effectively cuts down on hardware AND software license costs to less than a 1$ per hour even for extremely intensive analytics work.A separate and generic framework for this is the conceptual idea self deprecatingly called Ohri Framework (read here) . Since I lack both the money and the time , I have been trying to evangelize R to the cloud community and the cloud to the analytics community since last year. Watch this space – this action is heating up.