[R] simple parallel computing on single multicore machine

[Peter Dalgaard]

Millo Giovanni wrote:
> Dear List,
>
> the advent of multicore machines in the consumer segment makes me wonder
> whether it would, at least in principle, be possible to divide a
> computational task into more slave R processes running on the different
> cores of the same processor, more or less in the way package SNOW would
> do on a cluster. I am thinking of simple 'embarassingly parallel'
> problems, just like inverting 1000 matrices, estimating 1000 models or
> the like.
>
> I have seen some talk here on making R multi-threaded and the like, but
> this is much simpler. I am just a curious useR, so don't bother if you
> don't have time, but maybe you can point me at some resource, or just
> say "this is nonsense"...
>
>
>   
I don't think snow (or rather its underlying message-passing interface)
cares whether its processes are on different physical machines. So this
is easily doable. Of course you need to be aware that the processes are
competing for resources like RAM and disc.

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