[Quantian-general] Octave and R

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 16 February 2008 at 09:30, CalcPage at aol.com wrote:
| I've never used Octave or R.  I'm confused, I read somewhere that one  or 
| both of these packages can be used on a cluster?  

Yes and yes. [ R has add-on packages like Rmpi and Rpvm that enable this, and
additional wrappers like snow that wrap the details away. I talked about that
in several conference presentations related to quantian, so you could do to
those pdf files for starters. Quantian supports all of that. ] [ Octave has
MPI extensions, eg in ParallelKnoppix; this is not enabled in Quantian. ]
  
| Also, is Octave like MatLab and R like SPSS.  If so, could I just use  a book 
| on MatLab or SPSS to teach my self these packages?  

No, R is not like SPSS but like S-Plus as both implement the S language. 

So S / S-Plus books are a start, but R also comes with several manuals and
even more are at the www.r-project.org site as about 3 seconds of Google
searches would have revealed.

Dirk

-- 
Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.