sfsmisc (version 1.1-0)

Sys.cpuinfo: Provide Information about the Linux Hardware (CPU, Memory, etc)

Description

Return information about the Linux hardware, notably the CPU (the central processor unit) and memory of the computer R is running on. This is currently only available for Linux.

These functions exist on other unix-alike platforms, but produce an error when called.

Usage

Sys.procinfo(procfile)
Sys.cpuinfo()
Sys.meminfo()
Sys.memGB(kind = "MemTotal")
Sys.MIPS()

Arguments

procfile

name of file the lines of which give the CPU info ``as on Linux''

kind

a character string specifying which kind of memory is desired.

Value

The Sys.*info() functions return a "simple.list", here basically a named character vector, (where the names have been filtered through make.names(*, unique=TRUE) which is of importance for multi-processor or multi-core CPUs, such that vector can easily be indexed.

Sys.memGB() returns available memory in giga bytes [GB]; Sys.MIPS() returns a number giving an approximation of the Million Iinstructions Per Second that the CPU processes (using “bogomips”). This is a performance measure of the basic non-numeric processing capabilities. For single-core Linux systems, often about twice the basic clock rate in ``MHz'' (as available by Sys.cpuinfo()["cpu.MHz"]); now, with multicore systems, the result is often around (but smaller than) 2 * #{cores} * clock.rate.

See Also

Sys.ps, etc.

Examples

(n.cores <- parallel::detectCores())
if(substr(R.version[["os"]], 1,5) == "linux") { ##-- only on Linux
  Sys.cpuinfo() # which is often ugly; this looks much better:
  length(Sys.cpu2 <- local({I <- Sys.cpuinfo(); I[ !grepl("^flags", names(I)) ] }))
  ## may still be too much, notably if n.cores > 2:
  (Sys3 <- Sys.cpu2[!grepl("[.][0-9]+$", names(Sys.cpu2))])

  Sys.MIPS() ## just the 'bogomips' from above:
  Sys.MIPS() / as.numeric(Sys.cpuinfo()["cpu.MHz"]) ## ~~ 2 * #{cores} ((no longer))

  ## Available Memory -- can be crucial:
  Sys.memGB() #- default "MemTotal"
  if(Sys.memGB("MemFree") > 16)
     message("Be happy! You have more than 16 Gigabytes of free memory")
}