Tom Zeng shows how to use sparklyr on Amazon ElasticMapReduce:
The recently released sparklyr package by RStudio has made processing big data in R a lot easier. sparklyr is an R interface to Spark that allows users to use Spark as the backend for dplyr, one of the most popular data manipulation packages. sparklyr provides interfaces to Spark packages and also allows users to query data in Spark using SQL and develop extensions for the full Spark API.
You can also install sparklyr locally and point to a Spark cluster.