R does not engage my computer's GPU when running complex code

Question

I am running R Studio 64bit on a Windows10 laptop with a Nvidia GPU in it, however, when I am running code, specifically Rshiny apps, they take a long time. This laptop has a GPU but my task manager shows that the GPU is not being utilized. Would the GPU make my program run faster? I do not know much about hardware so forgive my ignorance regarding this.

Answer 1

In answer to your question getting a new GPU would have no impact on the speed of your code.

By default most R code is single threaded meaning that it will only use 1 CPU core. There are various ways to do parallel processing (using more than 1 core) in R. And there are also packages that can make use of GPUs. However it sounds like you are not using either of these.

There are various different ways that you could code your application that would make it more efficient. However how you would go about this would be specific to your code. I would suggest you ask a different question regarding.

Also Hadley's excellent book, Advance R , has techniques for profiling and benchmarking your code to increase performance: http://adv-r.had.co.nz/Profiling.html