parallel

It’s the morning of the first day of oral conferences at #ENAR2016. I feel like I have a spidey sense since I woke up 3 min after an email from Jeff Leek; just a funny coincidence.

I am currently trying to understand how to reduce the memory used by mclapply. This function is rather complicated and others have explained the differences versus parLapply (A_Skelton73, 2013; lockedoff, 2012 ) and also made it clear that in mclapply each job does not know if the others are running out of memory and thus cannot trigger gc (Urbanek, 2012).

A few weeks back I dedicated a short amount of time to actually read what plyr (Wickham, 2011) is about and I was surprised. The whole idea behind plyr is very simple: expand the apply() family to do things easy.