From astgtciv2008 at gatech.edu  Thu Sep  4 22:06:31 2008
From: astgtciv2008 at gatech.edu (David Bauer)
Date: Thu, 4 Sep 2008 16:06:31 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: [Rd] Erlang-style message-passing in R: Rmpi, Snow,
 NetWorkSpaces, etc.
In-Reply-To: <20080904183419.GA34060@piskorski.com>
Message-ID: <1637954103.1398941220558791777.JavaMail.root@mail7.gatech.edu>

> - taskPR:  Sounds equivalent to snow.  Also uses MPI underneath.

Actually, it is very different from snow.  taskPR was an attempt to get 'free' parallelism out of already existing programs by using simple data dependencies to figure out which individual statements in a program can be run in parallel.  The name comes from the description of the program as exploiting task-level parallelism.  Compare this to snow which uses data-level parallelism (performing the same operation on many pieces of data at once).  Additionally, MPI is optional, and only used for the initial setup of processes.
(If anybody actually uses or has successfully used this package, I would love to hear about it, btw.  While the package *does* work, there are probably few cases where it is worth it.)


David Bauer



[Rd] Erlang-style message-passing in R: Rmpi, Snow, NetWorkSpaces, etc.
David Bauer