Just a note in support of Matlab's sparse capabilities. For the last couple of years, I used Matlab successfully on large, sparse multiplication and factorization problems. A friend who was using R simply could not approach the scale I was able to work at, and I assume it's due to weak sparse support.
I was multiplying and inverting sparse triangular matrices of size 650K x 650K with Matlab, on a laptop. Just amazing.
I'm surprised there doesn't seem to be anything in CRAN using SuiteSparse. It could presumably run at petascale, similarly to the dense support, if someone did similar work.
I was multiplying and inverting sparse triangular matrices of size 650K x 650K with Matlab, on a laptop. Just amazing.