Support for parallel computation, including random-number generation.
This package was first included with R 2.14.0 in 2011.
There is support for multiple RNG streams with the
"L'Ecuyer-CMRG" RNG: see nextRNGStream.
It contains functionality derived from and pretty much equivalent to that contained in packages multicore (formerly on CRAN, with some low-level functions renamed and not exported) and snow (for socket clusters only, but MPI and NWS clusters generated by snow are also supported). There have been many enhancements and bug fixes since 2011.
This package also provides makeForkCluster to create
socket clusters by forking (not Windows).
For a complete list of exported functions, use
library(help = "parallel").
Parallel computation involves launching worker processes: functions
psnice and pskill in package tools
provide means to manage such processes.