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A general description is here.
There is a new package ‘parallel’.
It incorporates (slightly revised) copies of packages ‘multicore’ and ‘snow’ (excluding MPI, PVM and NWS clusters). Code written to use the higher-level API functions in those packages should work unchanged (apart from changing any references to their namespaces to a reference to ‘parallel’).
It also contains support for multiple RNG streams following L'Ecuyer _et al_ (2002), with support for both ‘mclapply’ and ‘snow’ clusters. This replaces functions like ‘clusterSetupRNG()’ from ‘snow’ (which are not in ‘parallel’).
Java detection (‘R CMD javareconf’) works around bogus ‘java.library.path’ property in recent Oracle Java binaries.
On some systems ‘help(".C", help_type = "pdf")’ and similar generated file names that TeX was unable to handle.
Non-blocking listening socket connections continued to report ‘isIncomplete’ as true even when the peer had closed down.