Comment by javierluraschi

In my experience, R is really fast since I t was designed to store data in columnar format which we now all know is best for data analysis. So, in most cases, scaling up computation is quite easy. To scale out, you can use Apache Spark with R, the interface I’ve worked on, sparklyr is quite easy to use and allows you to scale out computation. Just to give you an example of what’s possible, I was playing around yesterday with a ray tracing prototype someone is building and scaled it out in Spark, see https://twitter.com/javierluraschi/status/112055769372135424... — it’s a misconception that R is slow or can’t scale.