R package Rmpi is a layer between OpenMPI and R. Rmpi can spawn a cluster of worker nodes, send work to them, collect it up
There are several other parallel packages sit on top of Rmpi, such as
- SNOW (Ex60-HelloWorldSnow), SNOWFT (Ex61-HelloWorldSnowFT)
- doMPI, foreach, (and many other packages)
- R’s own “parallel” sits “on top” of SNOW and other cluster-level packages.