[R-SIG-Mac] FAQ? Mac distributed/multiple processor solutions?

[Kasper Daniel Hansen]

On Dec 4, 2007, at 12:52 AM, Rob Forsyth wrote:
> Alternatively I have an option to acquire a MacPro for this work and
> would appreciate guidance as to whether it's possible to leverage
> multiple processors?  I'm aware R itself is not currently
> multithreaded (whilst having only a lay understanding of what that
> means).

One important thing here: while R is not multithreaded, on Mac OS X,  
R uses a special BLAS which is multithreaded. So anything involving  
linear algebra (which for some problems is a major part of the  
computational load), will benefit from having multiple CPUs in the  
same machine. Depending on your problem this may be indeed speed up  
your things.

Kasper