# Parallel Workers on the Local Machine

# Introduction

This vignette illustrates how to launch parallel workers on the current, local machine. This works the same on all operating systems where R is supported, e.g. Linux, macOS, and MS Windows.

# Examples

## Example: Launching two parallel workers

The below illustrates how to launch a cluster of two parallel workers on the current machine, run some basic calculations in parallel, and then shut down the cluster.

    library(parallelly)
    library(parallel)

    cl <- makeClusterPSOCK(2)
    print(cl)
    #> Socket cluster with 2 nodes on host 'localhost' (R version 4.5.2
    #> (2025-10-31), platform x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)

    y <- parLapply(cl, X = 1:100, fun = sqrt)
    y <- unlist(y)
    z <- sum(y)
    print(z)
    #> [1] 671.4629

    parallel::stopCluster(cl)

Comment: In the parallel package, a parallel worker is referred to a parallel node, or short node, which is why we use the same term in the parallelly package.

An alternative to specifying the number of parallel workers is to specify a character vector with that number of `"localhost"` entries, e.g.

    cl <- makeClusterPSOCK(c("localhost", "localhost"))

## Example: Launching as many parallel workers as allotted

The `availableCores()` function will return the number of workers that the system allows. It respects many common settings that control the number of CPU cores that the current R process is allotted, e.g. R options, environment variables, and CGroups settings. For details, see `help("availableCores")`. For example,

    library(parallelly)
    cl <- makeClusterPSOCK(availableCores())
    print(cl)
    #> Socket cluster with 8 nodes on host 'localhost' (R version 4.5.2
    #> (2025-10-31), platform x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)