Using Multicore in R for a pentium 4 HT machine
multicore, r
Solution
There is a bunch of packages out there to do multicoring. See `doMPI`, `doSNOW`, `doMC` and `doSMP`. They are all front ends for other programs that run parallelization (like MPI/OpenMPI, multicore package...). On Windows, I've had good experience with `doSMP` while on Linux doMC looks promising (with some support for windows emerging, but some people have doubts about emulation of "fork").
That being said, I concur with Vince's comments about need to write `plyr` function to use the power of parallel computing. You could write your own function that emulate `plyr` (or edit `plyr`) that uses `%dopar%` (see `foreach` package as well).
Two "CPU usage history" windows could mean two cores or multi-threading. For instance, I have an i7-920 processor with 4 cores, but I see 8 history windows, because each core is multi-threaded.
Excuse my vocabulary and/or logic, but I would be that fish in Vince's post when it comes to these sort of things.
Problem
I am using a Pentium 4 HT machine at office for running R, some of the code requires plyr package, which I usually need to wait for 6-7 minutes for the script to finish running, while I saw my processor is only half utilized. I have heard of using Multicore package in R for better utilizing the multicore processor, is my case suitable for this? Thanks!