On Mar 8, 2011, at 5:45 AM, Ben Bond-Lamberty wrote:

> Alan,
> The multicore package is easy to use and, if you problem is indeed
> embarrassingly parallel (there's no communication between different
> models? how about between chains?) should be straightforward to add.
> Note that you'll need to run any multicore-using script from the
> Terminal command line, and not from the Mac GUI, though.

FWIW since multicore 0.1-4 and R 2.12.2 it should be possible to run multicore 
in the Mac GUI (as long as you don't explicitly call GUI or graphics code in 
the parallel parts).

Cheers,
Simon



> Ben
> 
> On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 3:14 AM, Alan Kelly <ake...@tcd.ie> wrote:
>> Dear all, I'm running a number of Bayesian binomial regression models using 
>> jags (interfacing with R via R2jags) on a Mac server with quad core 
>> processor running at 2.66 Ghz with 6 GB memory under Snow Leopard (session 
>> info below).  As the models contain around 30 predictors and between 5 to 15 
>> thousand observations, the time required to run a single model with 3 chains 
>> with an adequate number of iterations to ensure convergence is around 2 
>> hours.  While I can live with this for the occasional run, it will be a 
>> problem when I need to run several dozen different models.
>> Perhaps some of you have relevant experience and can advise if this run time 
>> could be significantly reduced using, for example, one of the parallel 
>> computing packages?  And if so, which one?  I should add that I'm not clear 
>> if jags can directly avail of multicore processing even if available - it 
>> might be necessary to program a Gibbs or Metropolis sampler directly in 
>> R.....
>> Any thoughts/suggestions?
>> Best wishes,
>> Alan Kelly
>> 
>> sessionInfo()
>> R version 2.12.1 (2010-12-16)
>> Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin9.8.0/x86_64 (64-bit)
>> 
>> locale:
>> [1] en_IE.UTF-8/en_IE.UTF-8/C/C/en_IE.UTF-8/en_IE.UTF-8
>> 
>> attached base packages:
>> [1] splines   stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   
>> base
>> 
>> other attached packages:
>> [1] car_2.0-9       survival_2.36-2 nnet_7.3-1      MASS_7.3-9      
>> foreign_0.8-41
>> 
>> loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
>> [1] tools_2.12.1
>> 
>> 
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> 
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