Seattle Conference on Scalability: High Performance Computin
3Google Tech Talks
June 14, 2008
ABSTRACT
Increasingly, R users have access to multiprocessor machines or multiple-core CPUs. However, base R does not natively support parallel processing; this can force R users to wait while computationally intensive work is done on a single processor or core and other processors or cores lie idle. NetWorkSpaces for R (NWS-R) is a Python-based tuple coordination system that is portable across virtually all popular computing platforms. NWS-R includes a web interface that displays the workspaces and their contents; this is helpful when debugging or developing a program, or monitoring the progress of an application. NWS-R is easy to learn, accessible from many development environments, and deployable on ad hoc collections of spare CPUs. The server and client for NWS-R are available at SourceForge (nws-r.sourceforge.net); the client is also available at CRAN (cran.r-project.org/web/packages/nws/). We will present NetWorkSpaces for R and demonstrate the web interface.
While we are using R as the primary example for our NetWorkSpaces product, we will also present interfaces to other languages such as python and matlab.
Speaker: David Hendersen
David Henderson holds a Ph.D. in statistical genetics from Virginia Tech and completed a post-doc at Iowa State University in the Statistics Department. He has held faculty positions in the Biostatistics Department at the University of Washington and at the University of Arizona. Before coming to REvolution Computing, he was a Research Scientist at the Insightful Corporation in Seattle.