My long-promised Rdsm package is now on CRAN. Some of you may recall that I made a prototype available on my own Web page last July. This is the official version, much evolved since I released the prototype.
The CRAN description states: Provides a threads-like programming environment for R, usable both on a multicore machine and across a network of multiple machines. The package gives the illusion of shared memory, again even across multiple machines on a network. This is based on a similar package I wrote for Perl back in 2002. Rdsm should complement the bigmemory package written by Mike Kane and Jay Emerson. As noted above and in my July announcement for my prototype, Rdsm works across a network of machines, while bigmemory is limited to multicore platforms. On the other hand, bigmemory is capable of handling huge data structures, which Rdsm is not. Rdsm is intended for parallel/distributed computing, while bigmemory is currently used primarily for the problems its name implies. However, if bigmemory is used as a parallel R vehicle on a multicore machine, it may be faster than Rdsm for some applications, given its direct use of bare shared memory; typically, though, they should provide similar performance in such contexts. By the way, I have a prototype of an infrastructure package to facilitate using bigmemory as a parallel R engine. Norm Matloff University of California, Davis ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.