Quick Intro to Parallel Computing in R

Learning Outcomes

• Understand what parallel computing is and when it may be useful
• Understand how parallelism can work
• Review sequential loops and *apply functions
• Understand and use the parallel package multicore functions
• Understand and use the foreach package functions

Introduction

Processing large amounts of data with complex models can be time consuming. New types of sensing means the scale of data collection today is massive. And modeled outputs can be large as well.For example, here’s a 2 TB (that’s Terabyte) set of modeled output data from Ofir Levy et al. 2016 that models 15 environmental variables at hourly time scales for hundreds of years across a regular grid spanning a good chunk of North America: