[R] R in a cluster environment?

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 8 Apr 2008, Tornes, Ivan E wrote:

> I'm a cluster administrator and one of my users has requested that I 
> install R on our system.  Can R be used in a cluster computing 
> environment that utilizes batch processing, i.e. no graphical output 
> during processing?

Yes, easily.

> Also, can R be parallelized to run on many nodes/processors 
> simultaneously?

Not R itself. However, there are R extensions to enable R tasks to be 
distributed to R processes running on separate systems, over MPI or PVM 
for example. AFAIK our cluster users of R do not do that, but they do run 
simulations involving many separate R tasks whose results are later 
combined.

> Ivan
>
> Ivan E. Tornes Ph.D.
> Battelle
> 505 King Avenue
> Columbus, OH 43201-2693
>  
> Phone:614-424-5165
> Fax:614-458-5165

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595