What's a reasonable desktop configuration to work on these topics at <i>home</i> for < $2000. I guess RAM and SSD would be as much as I can afford. How about processor & graphics? I think I want to experiment with Apache Spark, Hadoop, Scipy, R.
I don't want to buy laptop. The motherboard gave up on current Sager within 2 yrs. Also, I had trouble with optimus + linux in the past, so want to avoid optimus stuff.
I think it will be much cheaper to rent an instance on AWS or Digital Ocean , on an hourly basis, with Hadoop and Apache Spark already deployed.
That way you can play around with much larger datasets.<p><a href="http://aws.amazon.com/elasticmapreduce/" rel="nofollow">http://aws.amazon.com/elasticmapreduce/</a>