Create a cluster of co-workers' Windows 7 PCs for parallel processing in R?

Question

I am running the termstrc yield curve analysis package in R across 10 years of daily bond price data for 5 different countries. This is highly compute intensive, it takes 32

Answer 1

Yes you can. There are a number of ways. One of the easiest is to use redis as a backend (as easy as calling sudo apt-get install redis-server on an Ubuntu machine; rumor has that you could have a redis backend on a windows machine too).

By using the doRedis package, you can very easily en-queue jobs on a task queue in redis, and then use one, two, ... idle workers to query the queue. Best of all, you can easily mix operating systems so yes, your co-workers' windows machines qualify. Moreover, you can use one, two, three, ... clients as you see fit and need and scale up or down. The queue does not know or care, it simply supplies jobs.

Bost of all, the vignette in the doRedis has working examples of a mix of Linux and Windows clients to make a bootstrapping example go faster.