Central Processing Units (CPUs) or processors, are the workhorse of modern computing devices. For quite some time, processing manufacturers like Intel and AMD were racing to increase the clock speed (“Gigahertz”) of the processor. More recently, the race has been about increasing the concurrency - adding processor cores that perform tasks in parallel. While many of the lower level libraries in R take advantage of these cores, often there are “embarrassingly parallelizable” tasks we perform in a data analysis that can be drastically sped up via explicit parallelism.
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