FAQ? Mac distributed/multiple processor solutions?
I felt this must be an FAQ but I don't see it anywhere: my apologies if I've missed it. I have what I believe is known as an "embarrassingly parallel" problem comprising a large number of repetitions of a single (lengthy) calculation that generates a boolean result and I am simply interested in the final proportion of true to false runs. This obviously lends itself to parallel computation and I'd appreciate Mac- specific pointers to both simple distributed and multiple-processor options here. I am working on an iMac G5 and could access (at home - i.e. not on a LAN) another G5 and a G4. I've come across the R/MPI package but would appreciate advice as to how easy this is to set up (would it actually be simpler to divide the job "manually"?). Alternatively I have an option to acquire a MacPro for this work and would appreciate guidance as to whether it's possible to leverage multiple processors? I'm aware R itself is not currently multithreaded (whilst having only a lay understanding of what that means).