Parallel programming in R
Personal computers become more and more efficient. They are mostly equipped with multi-core processors. At the same time, most of the data mining tools, free or not, are often based on single-threaded calculations. Only one core is used during calculations, while others remain inactive. Previously, we have introduced two multithreaded variants of linear discriminant analysis in Sipina 3.10 and 3.11 . During the analysis that allowed me to develop the solutions introduced in Sipina, I had much studied parallelization mechanisms available in other Data Mining Tools. They are rather scarce. I noted that highly sophisticated strategies are proposed for the R software. These are often environments that enable to develop programs for multi-core processors machines, multiprocessor machines, and even for computer cluster. I studied in particular the "parallel" package which is itself derived from 'snow' and 'multicore' packages. Let us be quite clear. The library can...