[R-sig-hpc] parallel execution on a single machine: sockets vs multicore?

[Peter Langfelder]

Hi all,

I would like to parallelize some of my R code using either the socket
cluster approach or the parallel execution using multicore. At this
point I am leaning towards sockets since they also work on Windows
which would make my code  more portable. I am curious whether there
are some disadvantages of sockets vs. multicore - I know that with
multicore, worker processes don't incur extra memory overhead for
objects they use as read-only (because of modern OS copy-on-write
approach). Is that also true for a socket cluster run on a single
machine?

Thanks in advance for any insights.

Peter