JS Tan announces a new R package:
For users of the R language, scaling up their work to take advantage of cloud-based computing has generally been a complex undertaking. We are therefore excited to announce doAzureParallel, a lightweight R package built on Azure Batch that allows you to easily use Azure’s flexible compute resources right from your R session. The doAzureParallel package complements Microsoft R Server and provides the infrastructure you need to run massively parallel simulations on Azure directly from R.
The doAzureParallel package is a parallel backend for the popular foreach package, making it possible to execute multiple processes across a cluster of Azure virtual machines with just a few lines of R code. The package helps you create and manage the cluster in Azure, and register it as a parallel backend to be used with foreach.
It’s an interesting alternative to building beefy R servers.