OpenMP-style parallelism in data-centered multicore computing with R

Abstract

R is a domain specific language widely used for data analysis by the statistics community as well as by researchers in finance, biology, social sciences, and many other disciplines. As R programs are linked to input data, the exponential growth of available data makes high-performance computing with R imperative. To ease the process of writing parallel programs in R, code transformation from a sequential program to a parallel version would bring much convenience to R users. In this paper, we present our work in semiautomatic parallelization of R codes with user-added OpenMPstyle pragmas. While such pragmas are used at the frontend, we take advantage of multiple parallel backends with different R packages. We provide flexibility for importing parallelism with plug-in components, impose built-in MapReduce for data processing, and also maintain code reusability. We illustrate the advantage of the on-the-fly mechanisms which can lead to significant applications in data-centered parallel computing.