DO NOT USE FOR SNOW ANIMATION.The R package SNOW (acronym for Simple Network Of Workstations) provides a high-level interface for using a cluster of workstations for parallel computations. Use with the [r] tag.

The package snow (acronym for Simple Network Of Workstations) provides a high-level interface for using a cluster of workstations for parallel computations in R.

snow implements an interface to three different low-level mechanisms for creating a virtual connection between processes:

  • Socket
  • PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine)
  • MPI (Message Passing Interface)

The snowfall package provides a more recent alternative to snow. Functions can be used in sequential or parallel mode.

Resources: