Mastering Parallel Programming with R

by Simon Chapple, Eilidh Troup, Thorsten Forster

Master the robust features of R parallel programming to accelerate your data science computations This book is for R programmers who want to step beyond its inherent single-threaded and restricted memory limitations and learn how to implement highly accelerated and scalable algorithms that are a necessity for the performant processing of Big Data. No previous knowledge of parallelism is required. This book also provides for the more advanced technical programmer seeking to go beyond high level parallel frameworks. R is one of the most popular programming languages used in data science. Applying R to big data and complex analytic tasks requires the harnessing of scalable compute resources. Mastering Parallel Programming with R presents a comprehensive and practical treatise on how to build highly scalable and efficient algorithms in R. It will teach you a variety of parallelization techniques, from simple use of R's built-in parallel package versions of lapply(), to high-level AWS cloud-based Hadoop and Apache Spark frameworks. It will also teach you low level scalable parallel programming using RMPI and pbdMPI for message passing, applicable to clusters and supercomputers, and how to exploit thousand-fold simple processor GPUs through ROpenCL. By the end of the book, you will understand the factors that influence parallel efficiency, including assessing code performance and implementing load balancing; pitfalls to avoid, including deadlock and numerical instability issues; how to structure your code and data for the most appropriate type of parallelism for your problem domain; and how to extract the maximum performance from your R code running on a variety of computer systems. This book leads you chapter by chapter from the easy to more complex forms of parallelism. The author's insights are presented through clear practical examples applied to a range of different problems, with comprehensive reference information for each of the R packages employed. The book can be read from start to finish, or by dipping in chapter by chapter, as each chapter describes a specific parallel approach and technology, so can be read as a standalone.

244 pages, Paperback

Published May 31, 2016

Reviews

[Ferhat Culfaz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Only some chapters relevent. Covers different packages, but the examples are quite abstract and hard to follow.