Parallel Computing for Data Science

1.4. EXTENDED EXAMPLE: MUTUAL WEB OUTLINKS 11

others. This is known as a load balancing problem, one of the central issues

in the parallel processing field. We’ll address this in a refined version in

Chapter 3.

1.4.5.3 Analysis of the Code

So, how does all this work? Let’s dissect the code.

Even though snow and multicore are now part of R via the parallel

package, the package is not automatically loaded. So we need to take care

of this first, by placing a line

library ( p a r a l l e l )

at the top of our source file (if all these functions are in one file), or simply

execute the above library() call on the command line.

Or, we can insert a line

require ( p