We are currently experiencing an extremely hot month in Montréal (and more generally in North America). Looking at people having a beer, and starting the first barbecue of the year, I was wondering: if we asked people if global warming was a good ... [Read more...]

I really love the plyr package. Apart from having a progress bar and plyr handeling a lot of the overhead, a very interesting feature is being able to run plyr in parallel mode. Essentially, setting .parallel = TRUE runs any… See more › [Read more...]

Recently I’ve learned how to do parallel computing in R on a cluster of machines thanks to the R packages snowfall, snow, and Rmpi. I’ve been using the SOCKET method with snowfall since together they make things simple. With these tools, I can reduce day/week long jobs ... [Read more...]

I finally have time to try parallel computing in R using snowfall/snow thanks to this article in the 1st issue of R journal, which replaces R news. I didn’t try it before because i didn’t have a good toy example, and it seemed like a steep learning ... [Read more...]