[R-pkgs] Package bigmemory now available on CRAN

[Jay Emerson]

Package "bigmemory" is now available on CRAN.  A brief abstract follows:

Multi-gigabyte data sets challenge and frustrate R users even on
well-equipped hardware.
C/C++ and Fortran programming can be helpful, but is cumbersome for interactive
data analysis and lacks the flexibility and power of R's rich
statistical programming environment.
The new package bigmemory bridges this gap, implementing massive matrices
in memory (managed in R but implemented in C++) and supporting their
basic manipulation
and exploration. It is ideal for problems involving the analysis in R
of manageable
subsets of the data, or when an analysis is conducted mostly in C++.
In a Unix environment,
the data structure may be allocated to shared memory with transparent read
and write locking, allowing separate processes on the same computer to
share access to a
single copy of the data set. This opens the door for more powerful
parallel analyses and
data mining of massive data sets.

-- 
John W. Emerson (Jay)
Assistant Professor of Statistics
Department of Statistics
Yale University
http://www.stat.yale.edu/~jay