useR! 2010: Work with R on Amazon's Cloud

Tutorial: Work with R on Amazon's Cloud

Alex Zolot, StatVis Consulting, USA

Abstract

Usage of R is often constrained by available memory and/or cpu power. Cloud computing allows users to get as much resources as necessary in any specific moment. The tutorial will cover software tools and procedures that are useful to manage R applications on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3) cloud services.

Outline

The tutorial will cover the following topics:

1. Amazon's Web Services (AWS):

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Simple Storage Service (S3)
Elastic MapReduce
Amazon AWS console
Key Pairs

2. Basic instruments to work with remote server:

SSH
Putty
Xmings

3. Amazon Machine Images (AMIs)
- Launching
- Running
- Saving
4. Transferring R code and data to and from AWS

Execution
Important R packages

Potential attendees

Data mining professionals, statisticians, and anyone interested to learn how to use R with cloud computing.

Requirements

Basic R programming and computing knowledge. Participants should open Amazon's EC2 and S3 accounts in advance of the tutorial.

Tutorial Materials

Slides are here, and R code is here.