Data Analysis with R, Second Edition - Second Edition

Getting started with parallel R

Getting started with parallelization in R requires minimal setup, but that setup varies from platform to platform. More accurately, the setup is different for Windows than it is for every other operating system that R runs on (GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, *BSD, and others).

If you don't have a Windows computer, all you have to do to start is to load the parallel package:

# You don't have to install this if your copy of R is new 
library(parallel)

If you use Windows, you can either switch to the free operating system that over 97% of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world use, or you can run the following setup code:

library(parallel) 
cl <- makeCluster(4)

You may replace the 4 with however many processes ...