Dear R developers, with the inclusion of the package "parallel" in the upcoming release of R, users and package developers are likely to make increasing usage of parallelization features. In part, these features rely on forking the R process. As ?mcfork points out, fork()ing in a GUI process is typically a bad idea. In RKWard, we "only" seem to have problems with signals arriving in the wrong threads, and occasional failure to collect the results from child processes. I haven't entirely given up the hope to fix this, eventually, but in consequence, parallelization based on forking is not currently usable inside an RKWard session.
I am somewhat worried that, as library(parallel) gains acceptance, unsuspecting users will increasingly start to run into forking related problems in RKWard and other environments. Therefore, I wish: - The warning from ?mcfork about potential complications should also be visible on the documentation pages for the higher level functions mcparallel(), mclapply(), but also makeForkCluster(). - It would be nice to have a way to tell library(parallel) that forking is a bad idea in the current session, so that - mcfork() could stop with an informative error message, or at least produce a warning; mclapply() could fall back to mc.cores=1 with a warning. - third party packages which wish to use parallelization could check whether it is safe to use forking, or whether another mechanism should be used. I am aware that options(mc.cores=1) will effectively disable forking in mclapply(). However, this would make it look like (local) parallelization is not worth while at all, while actually, parallelization with makePSOCKCluster() works just fine. So, I'm looking for a way to selectively disable the use of forking. Thanks! Thomas
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