multi-core processing in R on windows XP - via doMC and foreach

Question

I\'m posting this question to ask for advice on how to optimize the use of multiple processors from R on a Windows XP machine.

At the moment I\'m creating 4 scripts (eac

Answer 1

You could try doSMP from REvolution Computing. For more information, see this blog posting: Parallel Multicore Processing with R (on Windows)

Answer 2

For completeness, here is the requested answer to Tal's comment which provides a simple and portable alternative. The answer consists of running

 > library(snow)
 > help(makeCluster)

and running the first three lines of code from the top of the Examples: section:

> cl <- makeCluster(c("localhost","localhost"), type = "SOCK")
> clusterApply(cl, 1:2, get("+"), 3)
[[1]]
[1] 4

[[2]]
[1] 5

> stopCluster(cl)
> .Platform$OS.type
[1] "windows"
> 

Was that really that hard?

Add-on packages like doSNOW and thereafter foreach can make use of this in a portable way.

Answer 3

Try the doSNOW parallel backend- it is supported out of the box on Windows. Use it with a snow socket cluster.