The package `snow' (Simple Network of Workstations), originally
announced in early form about a year ago on this list, is now
available from CRAN. Snow implements a simple mechanism for using a
workstation cluster for ``embarrassingly parallel'' computations in R.
The interface, which is based in part on the Python CoW (Cluster of
Workstations; http://www.scipy.org/) package, is intended to be quite
simple, and is designed so that it can be implemented on top of
several different lower level communication mechanisms. Three low
level interfaces have been implemented, one based on sockets, one
using PVM via the rpvm package, and one using MPI, via the Rmpi
package. The page
http://www.stat.uiowa.edu/~luke/R/cluster/cluster.html provides a
brief introduction and a simple example of using the cluster for
parallel bootstrapping. A paper on parallel computing in R using snow
is available as a technical report at
http://www.bepress.com/uwbiostat/paper193.
luke
--
Luke Tierney
University of Iowa Phone: 319-335-3386
Department of Statistics and Fax: 319-335-3017
Actuarial Science
241 Schaeffer Hall email: luke at stat.uiowa.edu
Iowa City, IA 52242 WWW: http://www.stat.uiowa.edu
