[R] R on a computer cluster

[Markus Schmidberger]

Hi,

your required performance is strongly depending on your application.
If you talk about a cluster, you should think about several computers. 
Not only one computer with several processors.

If you have several computers. First of all you have to decide for a 
communication protocol for parallel computing: MPI, PVM, ...
Then you have to install this at your computers. I think you should use 
MPI and one of its implementations: OpenMPI, LamMPI
Then there are several R packages for using the communication protocols: 
Rmpi, snow, Rpvm, ...

If you have one computer with severals processors, you can do the same 
thinks. But then you have only shared memory (bottleneck) and there is 
not to much improvement in performance. R is not yet implemented for 
multiple-processors. There is one first, experimental R package using 
openMP for multi threading: pnmath 
(http://www.stat.uiowa.edu/~luke/R/experimental/)

Some useful links:
http://www.stats.uwo.ca/faculty/yu/Rmpi/
http://ace.acadiau.ca/math/ACMMaC/Rmpi/
http://www.open-mpi.org/
http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~bgy1mm/MPITutorial/MPIHome.html

Best regards
Markus

gabriele.accetta at virgilio.it schrieb:
> Dear all,
>
> I usually run  R on my laptop with Windows XP Professional.
> Now I really want to run  R on a computer cluster (4 processors) with 
> Suse Linux Enterprise ver. 10.   But I  am new with computer cluster.
>
>
> Should I modify my functions in order to use the greater 
> performance 
> and availability than that provided by my laptop?
>
>
> Is there any R 
> manual  on parallel computations on multiple-processor? 
> Any suggestion 
> on a basic tutorial on this topic? 
>
> Thank you.
>
>