[R] Suggestions for poor man's parallel processing

[David Kane <David Kane]

Almost all of the heavy crunching I do in R is like:

> for(i in long.list){
+ do.something(i)
+ }
> collect.results()

Since all the invocations of do.something are independent of one another, there
is no reason that I can't run them in parallel. Since my machine has four
processors, a natural way to do this is to divide up long.list into 4 pieces
and then start 4 jobs, each of which would process 1/4 of the items. I could
then wait for the four jobs to finish (waiting for tag files and the like),
collect the results, and go on my happy way. I might do this all within R
(using system calls to fork off other R processes?) or by using Perl as a
wrapper.

But surely there are others that have faced and solved this problem already! I
do not *think* that I want to go into the details of RPVM since my needs are so
limitted. Does anyone have any advice for me? Various postings to R-help have
hinted at ideas, but I couldn't find anything definitive. I will summarize for
the list.

To the extent that it matters:

> R.version
         _                   
platform sparc-sun-solaris2.6
arch     sparc               
os       solaris2.6          
system   sparc, solaris2.6   
status                       
major    1                   
minor    5.0                 
year     2002                
month    04                  
day      29                  
language R                   


Regards,

Dave Kane
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