REvolution R
Three packages,iterators, foreach and doMC for the statistical computing language R are designed to allow all R users to more quickly handle large, complex sets of data. Iterators implements the “iterator” data structure familiar to users of languages like Java, C# and Python to make it easy to program useful sequences – from all the prime numbers to the columns of a matrix or the rows of an external database. Foreach builds on the “iterators” package to introduce a new way of programming loops in R. Unlike the traditional “for” loop, it runs multiple iterations simultaneously, in parallel. This makes loops run faster on a multi-core laptop, and enables distribution of large parallel-processing problems to multiple workstations in a cluster or in the cloud, without additional complicated programming. It works with parallel programming backends for R from the open-source and commercial domains. doMC is an open source parallel programming backend to enable parallel computation with “foreach” on Unix/Linux machines.
