Running Parallel Jobs in R
On Tue, 19 Nov 2002, Mohamed A. Kerasha wrote:
Dear All, I am completely new to R, and I was wondering if there is any way you can run concurrent jobs in R.
Depends on what you mean. Your subject line says "parallel", here you say "concurrent". Those are different. Processes on a time sharing single processor run concurrently; on a multiprocessor machine some of them may run in parallel. There are tools available for using R for parallel programming on a cluster of workstations. The rpvm and Rmpi packages available from CRAN provide powerful low level facilities for this. The package snow available at www.stat.uiowa.edu/~luke/R/cluster/ provides a simpler, higher level interface that is useful for many "embarassingly parallel" applications. snow runs on top of sockets, or rpvm, or Rmpi. snow is still udergoing changes in its basic design but should stabilize and get submitted to CRAN within a month or so. R does not currently allow multiple threads within a single R process. It may eventually allow concurrent threads; it is unlikely that it will ever allow parallel threads (for lots of reasons it will probably always be necessary to make sure that at most one R thread is running in the R internals at any given time). luke
Luke Tierney University of Iowa Phone: 319-335-3386 Department of Statistics and Fax: 319-335-3017 Actuarial Science 241 Schaeffer Hall email: luke@stat.uiowa.edu Iowa City, IA 52242 WWW: http://www.stat.uiowa.edu