SparkR provides an R frontend for the Apache Spark distributed computing framework. It allows users to perform large-scale data analysis from R by leveraging Spark's distributed execution engine and in-memory cluster computing capabilities. Key features of SparkR include distributed DataFrames that operate similarly to local R data frames but can scale to large datasets, over 100 built-in functions for data wrangling and analysis, and the ability to load data from sources like HDFS, HBase and Parquet files. Common machine learning algorithms like correlation analysis, k-means clustering and decision trees can be implemented using SparkR.