I'm parallelizing some computation on hierarchical data, and would find it natural to do something like this (where a call to parLapply is embedded in outer call to parLapply): cl <- makeCluster(rep.int('localhost', 5), type='SOCK') clusterExport(cl, 'cl') parLapply(cl, 1:5, function(i) parLapply(cl, 1:5, function(j) i * j)) Snow executes without error, but produces NULL; is embedded parallelization, in principle, possible?