R help - Apr 2008 - R in a cluster environment?

I'm a cluster administrator and one of my users has requested that I install
R on our system.  Can R be used in a cluster computing environment that utilizes
batch processing, i.e. no graphical output during processing?  Also, can R be
parallelized to run on many nodes/processors simultaneously?

Ivan

Ivan E. Tornes Ph.D.
Battelle
505 King Avenue
Columbus, OH 43201-2693
?
Phone:614-424-5165
Fax:614-458-5165

On Tue, 8 Apr 2008, Tornes, Ivan E wrote:
> I'm a cluster administrator and one of my users has requested that I 
> install R on our system.  Can R be used in a cluster computing 
> environment that utilizes batch processing, i.e. no graphical output 
> during processing?
Yes, easily.
> Also, can R be parallelized to run on many nodes/processors 
> simultaneously?
Not R itself. However, there are R extensions to enable R tasks to be 
distributed to R processes running on separate systems, over MPI or PVM 
for example. AFAIK our cluster users of R do not do that, but they do run 
simulations involving many separate R tasks whose results are later 
combined.
> Ivan
>
> Ivan E. Tornes Ph.D.
> Battelle
> 505 King Avenue
> Columbus, OH 43201-2693
> ?
> Phone:614-424-5165
> Fax:614-458-5165
-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
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