Outreach

This is a set of various updates in current xcms developments.

Parallel processing in XCMS

XCMS has supported parallel processing since 2008 in several processing functions that promise a linear speed-up if run in parallel on multiple input files, like e.g findPeaks() used in the xcmsSet() function. The parallelism was controlled by the nSlave argument.

Several mechanisms were supported, the first one, the Message Passing Interface (MPI) is the most powerful, as it is the standard on big HPC cluster systems. It also integrates with the Sun Grid Engine cluster queueing framework, and can "glue" your cluster into a seemingly singly big machine. At one stage, I was able to do a peak picking with nSlaves=100 :-) Later, other backend packages like SNOW and parallel were added as well.