Parallel R

Q. Ethan Mccallum

ISBN 10: 1449309925 / ISBN 13: 9781449309923

Published by O Reilly Media, 2011

About this Item

R is a wonderful thing, indeed: in recent years this free, open-source product has become a popular toolkit for statistical analysis and programming. Two of R's limitations -- that it is single-threaded and memory-bound -- become especially troublesome in the current era of large-scale data analysis. Num Pages: 122 pages, Illustrations. BIC Classification: UMX. Category: (XV) Technical / Manuals. Dimension: 233 x 178 x 8. Weight in Grams: 244. . 2011. Paperback. . . . . Books ship from the US and Ireland.

Seller Inventory # V9781449309923

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Parallel R
• Publisher: O Reilly Media
• Publication Date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1449309925
• ISBN 13: 9781449309923
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

It’s tough to argue with R as a high-quality, cross-platform, open source statistical software product—unless you’re in the business of crunching Big Data. This concise book introduces you to several strategies for using R to analyze large datasets. You’ll learn the basics of Snow, Multicore, Parallel, and some Hadoop-related tools, including how to find them, how to use them, when they work well, and when they don’t.

With these packages, you can overcome R’s single-threaded nature by spreading work across multiple CPUs, or offloading work to multiple machines to address R’s memory barrier.

Snow: works well in a traditional cluster environment Multicore: popular for multiprocessor and multicore computers Parallel: part of the upcoming R 2.14.0 release R+Hadoop: provides low-level access to a popular form of cluster computing RHIPE: uses Hadoop’s power with R’s language and interactive shell Segue: lets you use Elastic MapReduce as a backend for lapply-style operations

About the Authors

Q Ethan McCallum is a consultant, writer, and technology enthusiast, though perhaps not in that order. His work has appeared online on The O’Reilly Network and Java.net, and also in print publications such as C/C++ Users Journal, Doctor Dobb’s Journal, and Linux Magazine. In his professional roles, he helps companies to make smart decisions about data and technology.

Stephen Weston has been working in high performance and parallel computing for over 25 years. He was employed at Scientific Computing Associates in the 90's, working on the Linda programming system, invented by David Gelernter. He was also a founder of Revolution Computing, leading the development of parallel computing packages for R, including nws, foreach, doSNOW, and doMC. He works at Yale University as an HPC Specialist.