2 physical (when I check system report on my Mac), 4 virtual. On my MacBook Pro Late 2011 version with its 2.4 GHz Intel Core i5 processor, there are 4 cores. Check using the R package parallel library(parallel) # comes with base, no need to install On your laptop or desktop, you may have just one processor but it’ll have multiple cores.

If you have multiple cores on your computer (most modern computers do) that you can utilise (because R only runs one process aka thread by default, which runs on only one core)Ī core on the HPC cluster is what you automatically get when you make a job request, it specifies a single machine in the cluster network.

Which you might do with a for loop, but you should do with the apply family of functions ( lapply, tapply etc.) instead because they’re more efficient.

If you have to repeat the same steps several times.There’s more information on different ways of using parallel computing on Sheffield’s HPC site (though I don’t understand most of it…) the webpage on Parallel Processing in R at the Dept of Statistics, University of Michigan.the HPC User Guide provided by the University of Sussex.

The many documents on HPC and parallel computing put up by various universities around the world, particularly.this site on running the same R script on many different input files.R bloggers how to go parallel in R basics tips.References that I found useful in trying to understand this vast topic:

Foreach parallel on mac