R Programming By Example

Single-threaded processes

The fourth most important bottleneck people encounter is the fact that R language has no explicit constructs for parallelism. An out-of-the-box R installation cannot take advantage of multiple CPUs, and it does not matter if you install R on a powerful server with 64 CPU cores, R will only use one of them.

The way to fix this is to introduce parallelism in your implementations. However, doing so is not an easy task at all. In fact, serious parallelization efforts require deep hardware and software knowledge, and often depend on the specific hardware used to execute an implementation.

Even though it's a very difficult thing to do, and maybe even because of that, R has a lot of packages whose objectives are to provide ...