 I'd like to announce version 0.2 of the "doMPI" package, a
parallel backend for the "foreach" package, which acts as an
adaptor to the "Rmpi" package.  The package has been uploaded to
CRAN and is starting to be available on CRAN mirrors.

There are a number of changes which are described in the NEWS
file, but the most important is support for parallel random
number generation using the "L'Ecuyer-CMRG" random number
generator, as well as support functions from the "parallel"
package.

Two parallel random number generation mechanisms have been added
to doMPI.  The "setRngDoMPI" function initializes parallel
random number generator streams on each of the workers of the
cluster.  It is very similar to corresponding functions in the
"snow" and "parallel" packages.

The second mechanism is a new doMPI-specific "seed" option,
specified via the foreach ".options.mpi" argument, that allows a
different random number substream to be specified for each task
chunk when executing a foreach loop.  This allows the execution
of foreach loops to be reproducible with respect to random
number generation, even though task chunks may be executed by
different cluster workers on different runs.  Note that it is
recommended to use the doMPI-specific "chunkSize" option in
conjunction with the "seed" option, particularly when executing
a very large number of tasks.

I would like to acknowledge the work of Professor Brian Ripley
in implementing the "L'Ecuyer-CMRG" random number generator and
the support functions in "parallel" which made these
improvements possible.

- Steve Weston

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