R help - Nov 2008 - How is R working in multicore and multiprocessor environment?

My Dear R buddies,

I'm feeling ashamed that I've been running my R program on some
servers for a while but do not know exactly how R is working. The
servers are chained together using Sun Grid Engine. Each node has 8
quad-core CPUs. I wonder how many cores and CPUs are used by a simple
single-thread R program. Thanks a lot.

Best wishes,

-- 
??? Hesen Peng
http://hesen.peng.googlepages.com/

I see. So is it a good idea to use the snow package in running
programs on my intel duo core computer?

2008/11/23 jim holtman <jholtman at gmail.com>:
> R is single threaded except for some the BLAS matrix routines; it will
> only effective use a single core most of the time unless you have a
> problem that is making heavy use of matrix operations.
>
> On Sun, Nov 23, 2008 at 4:38 PM, Hesen Peng <hesen.peng at emory.edu>
wrote:
>> My Dear R buddies,
>>
>> I'm feeling ashamed that I've been running my R program on some
>> servers for a while but do not know exactly how R is working. The
>> servers are chained together using Sun Grid Engine. Each node has 8
>> quad-core CPUs. I wonder how many cores and CPUs are used by a simple
>> single-thread R program. Thanks a lot.
>>
>> Best wishes,
>>
>> --
>> ??? Hesen Peng
>> http://hesen.peng.googlepages.com/
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>> PLEASE do read the posting guide
http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Jim Holtman
> Cincinnati, OH
> +1 513 646 9390
>
> What is the problem that you are trying to solve?
>


-- 
??? Hesen Peng
http://hesen.peng.googlepages.com/

Hesen Peng wrote:
> My Dear R buddies,
> 
> I'm feeling ashamed that I've been running my R program on some
> servers for a while but do not know exactly how R is working. The
> servers are chained together using Sun Grid Engine. Each node has 8
> quad-core CPUs. I wonder how many cores and CPUs are used by a simple
> single-thread R program. Thanks a lot.

The quick answer to your question is easy: In principle 1 core.
Of course, you can make use of some parallelization framework. I'd 
suggest you start looking at snow and decide which underlying mechanism 
you are going to choose afterwards.

Best wishes;
uwe Ligges


> Best wishes,
>