A Platform for Parallel R-based Analytics on Cloud Infrastructure

Analytical workloads abound in application domains ranging from computational finance and risk analytics to engineering and manufacturing settings. In this paper we describe a Platform for Parallel R-based Analytics on the Cloud (P2RAC). The goal of this platform is to allow an Analyst to take a simulation or optimization job (both the code and associated data) that runs on their personal workstations and with minimum effort have them run on large-scale parallel cloud infrastructure. If this can be facilitated gracefully, an Analyst with strong quantitative but perhaps more limited development skills can harness the computational power of the cloud to solve larger analytically problems in less time. P2RAC is currently designed for executing parallel R scripts on the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud infrastructure. Preliminary results obtained from an experiment confirm the feasibility of the platform.