[R] simple parallel computing on single multicore machine

[Ramon Diaz-Uriarte]

On Friday 01 December 2006 13:23, Millo Giovanni wrote:
> Dear List,
>
> the advent of multicore machines in the consumer segment makes me wonder
> whether it would, at least in principle, be possible to divide a
> computational task into more slave R processes running on the different
> cores of the same processor, more or less in the way package SNOW would
> do on a cluster. I am thinking of simple 'embarassingly parallel'
> problems, just like inverting 1000 matrices, estimating 1000 models or
> the like.
>
> I have seen some talk here on making R multi-threaded and the like, but
> this is much simpler. I am just a curious useR, so don't bother if you
> don't have time, but maybe you can point me at some resource, or just
> say "this is nonsense"...



Dear Millo,

I find the usage of papply (from the library with the same name), which itself 
uses Rmpi to be easy and ideal for those cases. The papply documentation 
shows clearly what you need to do to pass the required arguments to papply. 
And once you have your MPI universe up and running (with whichever number of 
slaves you specify) it just works. As well, I find debugging very simple: 
just start an MPI universe with only one node, which forces papply to run 
serially (non-parallel) so wrong arguments, missing libraries, etc, are easy 
to spot.

Best,

R.





>
> Cheers
> Giovanni
>
> Giovanni Millo
> Research Dept.,
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-- 
Ramón Díaz-Uriarte
Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Oncológicas (CNIO)
(Spanish National Cancer Center)
Melchor Fernández Almagro, 3
28029 Madrid (Spain)
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Phone: +-34-91-224-6900

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