Mastering Parallel Programming with R

 This book is for the intermediate to advanced-level R developer who wants to understand how to harness the power of parallel computing to perform long running computations and analyze large quantities of data. You will require a reasonable knowledge and understanding of R programming. You should be a sufficiently capable programmer so that you can read and understand lower-level languages, such as C/C++, and be familiar with the process of code compilation. You may consider yourself to be the new breed of data scientist—a skilled programmer as well as a mathematician.

 What you need for this book

 To run the code in this book, you will require a multicore modern specification laptop or desktop computer. You will also require a decent bandwidth Internet connection to download R and the various R code libraries from CRAN, the main online repository for R packages.

 The examples in this book have largely been developed using RStudio version 0.98.1062, with the 64-bit R version 3.1.0 (CRAN distribution), running on a mid-2014 generation Apple MacBook Pro OS X 10.9.4, with a 2.6 GHz Intel Core i5 processor and 16 GB of memory. However, all of these examples should also work with the latest version of R.

 Some of the examples in this book will not be able to run with Microsoft Windows, but they should run without problem on variants of Linux. Each chapter will detail any required additional external libraries or runtime system requirements, and provide you with information on how to access and install them. This book's errata section will highlight any issues discovered post publication.