I’ve put together an updated version of my partools package, including Snowdoop, an alternative to MapReduce algorithms.  You can download it here, version 1.0.1.

To review:  The idea of Snowdoop is to create your own file chunking, rather than having something like Hadoop do it for you, and then using ordinary R coding to perform parallel operations.  This avoids the need to deal with new constructs and complicated configuration issues with Hadoop and R interfaces to it.

Major changes are as follows:

• There is a k-means clustering example of Snowdoop in the examples/ directory.  Among other things, it illustrates the fact that with the Snowdoop approach, one automatically achieves a “caching” effect lacking in Hadoop, trivially by default.
• There is a filesort() function, to sort a distributed file, keeping the result in memory in distributed form.  I don’t know yet how efficient it will be relative to Hadoop.
• There are various new short utility functions, such as filesplit().

Still not on Github yet, but Yihui should be happy that I converted the Snowdoop vignette to use knitr. 🙂

All of this is still preliminary, of course.  It remains to be seen to what scale this approach will work well.