In the 108. issue of Linux User & Developer was an article “Supercharge your R experience” about using parallel techniques to analyse large amounts of data with R.

4 page step-by-step tutorial shows the basics needed for installing needed packages (multicore, Rmpi and SNOW) and doing basic stuff to give you idea of how setting up and running parallel configurations for R. It doesn’t take very deep approach but it gives you some ideas and points you to the packages needed for learning more. It’s also suitable for rookies since you really don’t have to know much R to be able to follow up.

If you’re interested about the topic, you should check the magazine for more. I’m not a regular reader of LU&D so I’m not sure how much they have R in their issues but I was happy to hear from a friend about this article.

You should also check out CRAN Task View page about High-Performance and Parallel Computing with R