Updates to the foreach package and its friends
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By Andrie de Vries
Earlier this month Rich Calaway, programme manager at Microsoft and maintainer of the foreach package, published some updates to the foreach suite of packages, including:
Most of the changes were cosmetic, or to conform to CRAN policy. However, the last two packages (doParallel and doSNOW) had some functional changes.
doSnow
The doSNOW package is a foreach parallel adaptor for the ‘snow’ Package. Thus it provides a parallel backend for the %dopar% function using Luke Tierney’s snow package. (The snow package itself enables a “Simple Network of Workstations”, i.e. support for simple parallel computing in R.)
The functional changes to doSNOW were the addition of support for user-defined progress bars.
This means that you easily enable progress bars when setting up a parallel job with doSNOW.
You can try it out with this code:
You can get other examples here.
doParallel
The doParallel package provides a parallel backend for the %dopar% function using the parallel package (part of base R).
In doParallel, the most important change (change log) was a bug fix to stopImplicitCluster functionality, courtesy of Dan Tenenbaum.
Previous blog posts
We have previously written about the foreach package and parallel processing:
- Tutorial: Parallel programming with foreach
- Creating progress bars with foreach parallel processing
- Monitoring progress of a foreach parallel job
Resources
To get started with foreach, take a look at the vignette at https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/foreach/vignettes/foreach.pdf
To get started with parallel programming with foreach and doParallel, the vignette is a great a resource: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/doParallel/vignettes/gettingstartedParallel.pdf
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