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Hands-on tutorial for parallel computing with R

Computational Statistics volume 26, pages 219–239 (2011)Cite this article

Abstract

Due to the increasing availability of powerful hardware resources, parallel computing is becoming an important issue, as a noticeable speedup may be achieved. The statistical programming language R allows for parallel computing on computer clusters as well as multicore systems through several packages. This tutorial gives a short, practical overview of four, in view of the authors, important packages for parallel computing in R, namely multicore, snow, snowfall and nws. First, the general principle of parallelizing simple tasks is briefly illustrated based on a statistical cross-validation example. Afterwards, the usage of each of the introduced packages is being demonstrated on the example. Furthermore, we address some specific features of the packages and provide guidance for selecting an adequate package for the computing environment at hand.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Statistics, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, 80539, Munich, Germany

    Manuel J. A. Eugster

  2. Institute of Medical Biometry and Medical Informatics, University Medical Center Freiburg, 79104, Freiburg, Germany

    Jochen Knaus & Christine Porzelius

  3. Division of Biometrics and Bioinformatics, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, 81377, Munich, Germany

    Markus Schmidberger & Esmeralda Vicedo

Authors
  1. Manuel J. A. Eugster
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  2. Jochen Knaus
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  3. Christine Porzelius
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  4. Markus Schmidberger
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  5. Esmeralda Vicedo
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Manuel J. A. Eugster.

Additional information

Manuel J. A. Eugster, Jochen Knaus, Christine Porzelius, Markus Schmidberger, and Esmeralda Vicedo contributed equally to this work.

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Eugster, M.J.A., Knaus, J., Porzelius, C. et al. Hands-on tutorial for parallel computing with R. Comput Stat 26, 219–239 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00180-010-0206-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00180-010-0206-4

Keywords

  • Parallel computing
  • R
  • Multicore
  • Snow
  • Snowfall
  • nws