[R] Parallel computing on Windows (foreach)

[Sergey Goriatchev]

Hello,

I am reading "Using The foreach Package" document and I have tried the
following:

---------------------------------------------------------------------

> sessionInfo()
R version 2.10.1 (2009-12-14)
i386-pc-mingw32

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=German_Switzerland.1252
LC_CTYPE=German_Switzerland.1252
LC_MONETARY=German_Switzerland.1252 LC_NUMERIC=C
 LC_TIME=German_Switzerland.1252

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base

other attached packages:
[1] foreach_1.3.0   codetools_0.2-2 iterators_1.0.3


> x <- numeric(10000)
> system.time(for(i in 1:10000) x[i] <- sqrt(i))
   user  system elapsed
   0.03    0.00    0.03
>
> system.time(system.time(x <- foreach(i=1:10000, .combine="c") %do% sqrt(i)))
   user  system elapsed
   7.14    0.00    7.14
>
> system.time(system.time(x <- foreach(i=1:10000, .combine="c") %dopar% sqrt(i)))
   user  system elapsed
   7.19    0.00    7.19
Warning message:
executing %dopar% sequentially: no parallel backend registered

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Not only is the sequential foreach much slower than the simple
for-loop (as least in this particular instance), but I am not quite
sure how to make foreach run parallel. Where would I get this parallel
backend? I looked at doMC and doRedis, but these do not run on
Windows, as far as I understand. And doSNOW is something to use when
you have a cluster, while I have a simple dual-core PC.

It is not really clear for how to make parallel computing work. Please, help.

Regards,
Sergey