Compute resource options for RStudio in projects

When you run RStudio in a project, you choose an environment template for the runtime environment. The environment template specifies the type, size, and power of the hardware configuration, plus the software template.

What consumes CUH?

RStudio assets consume capacity unit hours (CUH) as long as they are running.

Types of environments

You can use this type of environment with RStudio:

  • Default RStudio CPU environments for standard workloads

Default environment templates

You can select any of the following default environment templates for RStudio in a project. These default environment templates are listed under Templates on the Environments page on the Manage tab of your project. All environment templates use RStudio with Runtime 24.1 on the R 4.3 programming language.

Default RStudio environment templates
Name Hardware configuration Local storage CUH rate per hour
Default RStudio L 16 vCPU and 64 GB RAM 2 GB 8
Default RStudio M 8 vCPU and 32 GB RAM 2 GB 4
Default RStudio XS 2 vCPU and 8 GB RAM 2 GB 1

If you don't explicitly select an environment, Default RStudio M is the default. The hardware configuration of the available RStudio environments is preset and cannot be changed.

For compute-intensive processing on a large data set, consider pushing your data processing to Spark from your RStudio session. See Using Spark in RStudio.

To prevent consuming extra capacity unit hours (CUHs), stop all active RStudio runtimes when you no longer need them. See RStudio idle timeout.

Compute usage in projects

RStudio consumes compute resources as CUH from the watsonx.ai Studio service in projects.

You can monitor the watsonx.ai Studio CUH consumption on the Resource usage page on the Manage tab of your project.

Runtime scope

An RStudio environment runtime is always scoped to a project and a user. Each user can only have one RStudio runtime per project at one time. If you start RStudio in a project in which you already have an active RStudio session, the existing active session is disconnected and you can continue working in the new RStudio session.

Changing the RStudio runtime

If you notice that processing is very slow, you can restart RStudio and select a larger environment runtime.

To change the RStudio environment runtime:

  1. Save any data from your current session before switching to another environment.
  2. Stop the active RStudio runtime under Tool runtimes on the Environments page on the Manage tab of your project.
  3. Restart RStudio from the Launch IDE menu on your project's action bar and select another environment with the compute power and memory capacity that better meets your data processing requirements.

Learn more

Parent topic: Choosing compute resources for tools