Best practices, news, tips and tricks - learn about Oracle's R Technologies for Oracle Database and Big Data
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December 6, 2013
Oracle R Distribution 3.0.1 now available for Windows 64-bit
We are excited to introduce support for Oracle R Distribution 3.0.1 on Windows 64-bit
versions. Previous releases are available on Solaris x86, Solaris SPARC, AIX and Linux 64-bit platforms. Oracle R Distribution (ORD) continues to support these platforms and now expands
support to Windows 64-bit platforms.
ORD is Oracle's free distribution of the open source R environment
that adds support for dynamically loading the Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL) installed on
your system. MKL provides faster performance by taking advantage of hardware-specific
math library implementations. The net effect is optimized processing speed, especially on
multi-core systems.
To enable MKL support on your ORD Windows client:
1. Add the location of libOrdBlasLoader.dll and mkl_rt.dll to the PATH system environment
variable on the client.
In a typical ORD 3.0.1 installation, libOrdBlasLoader.dll is
located in the R HOME directory:
2. Start R and execute the function Sys.BlasLapack:
R> Sys.BlasLapack()
$vendor
[1] "Intel Math Kernel Library (Intel MKL)"
$nthreads
[1] -1
The vendor value returned indicates the presence of MKL instead of R's internal BLAS. The
value for the number of threads to utilize, nthreads = -1, indicates all available cores are used by
default. To modify the number of threads used, set the system environment variable MKL_NUM_THREADS = n, where n is the number of physical cores in the system you wish to use.
Oracle R Distribution will be certified with a future release of Oracle R Enterprise, and is available now from Oracle's free and Open Source Software portal. Questions and comments are welcome on the Oracle R Forum.