Sign In Start Free Trial
Account

Add to playlist

Create a Playlist

Modal Close icon
You need to login to use this feature.
  • Book Overview & Buying Mastering Parallel Programming with R
  • Table Of Contents Toc
Mastering Parallel Programming with R

Mastering Parallel Programming with R

By : Simon R. Chapple, Sloan, Forster, Troup
5 (4)
close
close
Mastering Parallel Programming with R

Mastering Parallel Programming with R

5 (4)
By: Simon R. Chapple, Sloan, Forster, Troup

Overview of this book

R is one of the most popular programming languages used in data science. Applying R to big data and complex analytic tasks requires the harnessing of scalable compute resources. Mastering Parallel Programming with R presents a comprehensive and practical treatise on how to build highly scalable and efficient algorithms in R. It will teach you a variety of parallelization techniques, from simple use of R’s built-in parallel package versions of lapply(), to high-level AWS cloud-based Hadoop and Apache Spark frameworks. It will also teach you low level scalable parallel programming using RMPI and pbdMPI for message passing, applicable to clusters and supercomputers, and how to exploit thousand-fold simple processor GPUs through ROpenCL. By the end of the book, you will understand the factors that influence parallel efficiency, including assessing code performance and implementing load balancing; pitfalls to avoid, including deadlock and numerical instability issues; how to structure your code and data for the most appropriate type of parallelism for your problem domain; and how to extract the maximum performance from your R code running on a variety of computer systems.
Table of Contents (8 chapters)
close
close

Chapter 1. Simple Parallelism with R

In this chapter, you will start your journey toward mastery of parallelism in R by quickly learning to exploit the multicore processing capability of your own laptop and travel onward to our first look at how you can most simply exploit the vast computing capacity of the cloud.

You will learn about lapply() and its variations supported by R's core parallel package as well as about the segue package that enables us to utilize Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the Elastic Map Reduce (EMR) service. For the latter, you will need to have an account set up with AWS.

Our worked example throughout this chapter will be an iterative solver for an ancient puzzle known as Aristotle's Number Puzzle. Hopefully, this will be something new to you and pique your interest. It has been specifically chosen to demonstrate an important issue that can arise when running code in parallel, namely imbalanced computation. It will also serve to help develop our performance benchmarking skills—an important consideration in parallelism—measuring overall computational effectiveness.

The examples in this chapter are developed using RStudio version 0.98.1062 with the 64-bit R version 3.1.0 (CRAN distribution) running on a mid-2014 generation Apple MacBook Pro OS X 10.9.4 with a 2.6 GHz Intel Core i5 processor and 16 GB memory. Some of the examples in this chapter will not be able to run with Microsoft Windows, but should run without problem on all variants of Linux.

Visually different images
CONTINUE READING
83
Tech Concepts
36
Programming languages
73
Tech Tools
Icon Unlimited access to the largest independent learning library in tech of over 8,000 expert-authored tech books and videos.
Icon Innovative learning tools, including AI book assistants, code context explainers, and text-to-speech.
Icon 50+ new titles added per month and exclusive early access to books as they are being written.
Mastering Parallel Programming with R
notes
bookmark Notes and Bookmarks search Search in title playlist Add to playlist download Download options font-size Font size

Change the font size

margin-width Margin width

Change margin width

day-mode Day/Sepia/Night Modes

Change background colour

Close icon Search
Country selected

Close icon Your notes and bookmarks

Confirmation

Modal Close icon
claim successful

Buy this book with your credits?

Modal Close icon
Are you sure you want to buy this book with one of your credits?
Close
YES, BUY

Submit Your Feedback

Modal Close icon
Modal Close icon
Modal Close icon