R Batteries Included (R 4.6.1 with OpenBLAS and Intel MKL)

Do you want a free, zero-config performance upgrade for R on Windows?

Switching linear algebra libraries on Linux is a breeze, but doing it on Windows is particularly complicated. R on Windows provides a numerical library, libRblas, that just works but that can be much faster. To solve this, I created R Batteries Included.

R Batteries Included is an R distribution that offers a simplified installer featuring:

• Automatic CPU tuning: Detects your hardware to maximize linear algebra speeds.
• Library flexibility: Choose between OpenBLAS and Intel MKL for faster linear algebra operations.
• Dependencies handling: Ships pre-configured components so you can install packages from source (e.g., GitHub) without seeing C/C++ compiler errors.
  

No code modifications. No workflow changes. Just your exact same scripts, running faster.

See the plots showing the speed gains. I used the famous AT&T Benchmark.

Notes:

• Use OpenBLAS with AMD and non-Intel hardware.
• The benchmarks were run on a ThinkPad T480s running Windows 10 Pro.
• Uninstall other R installations beforehand so that RStudio/VSCode/others detect this R distribution.
• R is an open programming language. I charge the price of a cinema ticket for the time to create, test and maintain this expanded distribution.