The package `snow' (Simple Network of Workstations), originally announced in early form about a year ago on this list, is now available from CRAN. Snow implements a simple mechanism for using a workstation cluster for ``embarrassingly parallel'' computations in R. The interface, which is based in part on the Python CoW (Cluster of Workstations; http://www.scipy.org/) package, is intended to be quite simple, and is designed so that it can be implemented on top of several different lower level communication mechanisms. Three low level interfaces have been implemented, one based on sockets, one using PVM via the rpvm package, and one using MPI, via the Rmpi package. The page http://www.stat.uiowa.edu/~luke/R/cluster/cluster.html provides a brief introduction and a simple example of using the cluster for parallel bootstrapping. A paper on parallel computing in R using snow is available as a technical report at http://www.bepress.com/uwbiostat/paper193.
luke -- Luke Tierney University of Iowa Phone: 319-335-3386 Department of Statistics and Fax: 319-335-3017 Actuarial Science 241 Schaeffer Hall email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Iowa City, IA 52242 WWW: http://www.stat.uiowa.edu ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
