Aborting a parallel computation is in general not possible

[martin-ueding]

We sometimes want to abort a parallel computation. CtrlC does not have any effect, it does not exit. We have helped outselves with CtrlZ, which stops the current process and moves it to the background. The problem is that this process still takes up memory and sometimes even has a lock on the R library. Logging out of that particular session then kills all the children.

This is not really nice, especially since in RStudio you are just stuck with a process you cannot control any more and need to restart R within RStudio.

It would be desirable to have a mechanism of stopping a mclapply.

[martin-ueding]

Apparently that only happens with pbmclapply but not mclapply. I have filed a bug with pbmclapply for this.