multicore

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NEWS/ChangeLog for multicore
------------------------------

0.1-4   (under development)
    o   added (experimental) support for Windows
        Note: it (sort of) works on Windows 2k and XP only. Vista and
        Windows 7 is not supported due to changes to the kernel. Since
        Vista it becomes increasingly unlikely that multicore will be
        possible on Windows in general.

    o   added cores detection for FreeBSD (thanks to Gunnar Schaefer)

    o   added pvec() function which splits up the call of a vectorized
        map function across cores and re-combines them. It is useful
        for computation on large vectors.

0.1-3   2009-02-02
    o   simplify the internal management of child processes and
        consequently remove bugs that lead to poor feeding of cores
        in mclapply() when no precheduling was used

0.1-2   2009-01-09
    o   added mc.preschedule parameter to mclappy() which (if FALSE)
        allows on-demand distribution of FUN calls across cores.

    o   added "silent" parmeter to parallel() and mclapply()
        suppressing output on stdout in child processes

    o   added internal functions closeStdout(), closeStrerr(),
        closeFD(), closeAll(), isChild(), childrenDescriptors() and
        masterDescriptor()

    o   selectChildren() implicitly checks for and removes zombies

    o   removed spurious debugging output in mclapply()

    o   fixed cases in which mclapply() would not preserve names

    o   fixed child list management

    o   in order to make sure that children cannot die before the
        master can collect results, children will specifically wait
        for the master to allow them to exit (SIGUSR1 is used for this
        purpose, so don't use it directly unless you want a child to
        exit even if the master didn't release it).

0.1-1   2009-01-03
    o   added name parameter to parallel(), accordingly collect()
        names the results if the job name is present

    o   bug fix: collect() returned early if no jobs responded for a
        while

    o   bug fix: internal list of children could get corrupted when a
        child was removed (all preceding children were removed as well)

    o   added better debugging support. Set PKG_CFLAGS=-DMC_DEBUG to
        enable debugging output on stdout (it is purposefully not sent
        to the R console to prevent output processing issues in child
        processes)

0.1-0   2009-01-02
    o   initial release