David Smith reports an update on the doAzureParallel R package:
At the EARL conference in San Francisco this week, JS Tan from Microsoft gave an update (PDF slides here) on the doAzureParallel package . As we’ve noted here before, this package allows you to easily distribute parallel R computations to an Azure cluster. The package was recently updated to support using automatically-scaling Azure Batch clusters with low-priority nodes, which can be used at a discount of up to 80% compared to the price of regular high-availability VMs.
JS Tan using doAzureParallel #rstats package to run simulation on a cluster of 20 low-priority Azure VMs. Total cost: $0.02 #EARLConf2017pic.twitter.com/Mpl3IUa9zY
— David Smith (@revodavid) June 7, 2017
That lowers the barrier to usage significantly, so it’s a very welcome update.