Amazon Web Services has introduced the AWS Revolution R service, providing a hosted version of the R programming language for data analysis projects.

The service is based on Revolution R Enterprise 7, which has multi-threading, and can be used to access data stored in Amazon S3 and AWS Relational Data Service (RDS).

R was originally developed for statistical analysis and graphics apps, but is becoming increasingly popular for big-data analysis. Revolution R Enterprise is a commercial version of R, and can make use of multiple processors. Users of the R service will pay $1.25 per core per hour, and you can try it out for free for 14 days.

The service is pay as you go, so you only pay for the capacity of data you’re analyzing. According to the announcement about the new service on the Revolutionary Analytics website, the scalable, parallel predictive analytics use Revolution R Enterprise ScaleR, which lets you analyze data sets up to one terabyte. If you need to analyze more data, the company says it would be more cost effective to move to a private cloud. You also get an IDE in which to develop your R apps.

The AWS Revolution R service, which runs as a virtual machine image, can scale from 2 to 32 vCPUs (virtual CPUs), and can be run on either Windows or Linux.