R is easy to install on your desktop using pre-packaged installers. Go to the R project home page and follow the link to "download R." Run the installer program following the directions for your operating system. Once R is installed on your local machine, you can open the program, which will start up as an R console window.

Many people prefer to develop and perform data exploration in a GUI environment like RStudio (a free download). RStudio is an open source product that provides a versatile IDE that will work in Windows, Mac and Linux environments, providing a script editor, a console interface and a display for plots. Note: RStudio requires that R is installed first; It is not a stand-alone program.

Running R locally allows you to develop and debug scripts and check your R code against test datasets. After your scripts are working correctly, you could transfer them to a batch environment such as the one on Frontera to run larger problems that require more compute resources. RStudio is also available on many HPC systems; the page on Setting Up R on Frontera describes how to access RStudio on that particular system.