by Martin Male [CC BY 2.0]

Who would’ve thought that parallel processing in R is THAT simple? Thanks to a collection of packages having a task use all available cores is a cinch. I call an Intel i7-3632QM my own – which means 4 physical cores each providing 2 virtual cores running at something around 3 GHz. So let’s have a look at how this feat is accomplished.

The method of parallelization applied here works by starting a specified number of regular R processes and have those run on the available cores. The launch, stop of the those processes and the assignment of tasks is controlled from the original R process. The assignment of those processes to the cores is controlled by the OS. Because this method can be extended to cores beyond one CPU or computer the packages use the acronym SNOW for “Simple Network Of Workstations”.

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