Rmpi is a package for R, a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is an interface (wrapper) to MPI (Message-Passing Interface). MPI is a standardized and portable message-passing system designed by a group of researchers from academia and industry to function on a wide variety of parallel computers such as Beowulf clusters.
There are many implementations of MPI. The popular ones are
Most MPI implementations are either C, C++, or Fortran libraries. One has to program in C, C++, or Fortran, in order to run parallel jobs.
The main goal of Rmpi is to port low level MPI functions into R so that users do not have to know C or Fortran. Rmpi was initially to run under LAM-MPI and was developed on redhat 9. Over years, Rmpi has been ported to work under other implementations of MPI such as MPICH(2) and OpenMPI. It can be run under various distributions of linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.
The license of Rmpi is put under GPL version 2 or newer.