Introducing PARALLEL: Stata Module for Parallel Computing

Inspired in the R library 'snow' and to be used in multicore CPUs, parallel implements parallel computing methods through an OS's shell scripting (using Stata in batch mode) to accelerate computations. By splitting the dataset into a determined number of clusters this module repeats a task simultaneously over the data-clusters, allowing to increase efficiency between two and five times, or more depending on the number of cores of the CPU. Without the need of StataMP, parallel is, to the author's knowledge, the first user contributed Stata module to implement parallel computing.