A commonly asked question in the R community is: How can I parallelize the following for-loop? The answer almost always involves rewriting the for (...) { ... } loop into something that looks like a y <- lapply(...) call. If you can achieve that, you can parallelize it via for instance y <- future.apply::future_lapply(...) or y <- foreach::foreach() %dopar% { ... }. For some for-loops it is straightforward to rewrite the code to make use of lapply() instead, whereas in other cases it can be a bit more complicated, especially if the for-loop updates multiple variables in each iteration.

New versions of the following future backends are available on CRAN: future.callr - parallelization via callr, i.e. on the local machine future.batchtools - parallelization via batchtools, i.e. on a compute cluster with job schedulers (SLURM, SGE, Torque/PBS, etc.) but also on the local machine future.BatchJobs - (maintained for legacy reasons) parallelization via BatchJobs, which is the predecessor of batchtools These releases fix a few small bugs and inconsistencies that were identified with help of the future.

future 1.9.0 - Unified Parallel and Distributed Processing in R for Everyone - is on CRAN. This is a milestone release: Standard output is now relayed from futures back to the master R session - regardless of where the futures are processed! Disclaimer: A future’s output is relayed only after it is resolved and when its value is retrieved by the master R process. In other words, the output is not streamed back in a “live” fashion as it is produced.

R.devices 2.16.0 - Unified Handling of Graphics Devices - is on CRAN. With this release, you can now easily suppress unwanted graphics, e.g. graphics produced by one of those do-everything-in-one-call functions that we all bump into once in a while. To suppress graphics, the R.devices package provides graphics device nulldev(), and function suppressGraphics(), which both send any produced graphics into the void. This works on all operating systems, including Windows.

Got compute? future.apply 1.0.0 - Apply Function to Elements in Parallel using Futures - is on CRAN. With this milestone release, all* base R apply functions now have corresponding futurized implementations. This makes it easier than ever before to parallelize your existing apply(), lapply(), mapply(), … code - just prepend future_ to an apply call that takes a long time to complete. That’s it! The default is sequential processing but by using plan(multiprocess) it’ll run in parallel.

As promised - though a bit delayed - below are links to my slides and the video of my talk on Future: Parallel & Distributed Processing in R for Everyone that I presented last month at the eRum 2018 conference in Budapest, Hungary (May 14-16, 2018). The conference was very well organized (thank you everyone involved) with a great lineup of several brilliant workshop sessions, talks, and poster presentations (thanks all).

future 1.8.0 is available on CRAN. This release lays the foundation for being able to capture outputs from futures, perform automated timing and memory benchmarking (profiling) on futures, and more. These features are not yet available out of the box, but thanks to this release we will be able to make some headway on many of the feature requests related to this - hopefully already by the next release.

x[idxs + 1] or x[idxs + 1L]? That is the question. Assume that we have a vector $x$ of $n = 100,000$ random values, e.g. > n <- 100000 > x <- rnorm(n) and that we wish to calculate the $n-1$ first-order differences $y=(y_1, y_2, …, y_{n-1})$ where $y_i=x_{i+1} - x_i$. In R, we can calculate this using the following vectorized form: > idxs <- seq_len(n - 1) > y <- x[idxs + 1] - x[idxs] We can certainly do better if we turn to native code, but is there a more efficient way to implement this using plain R code?

New release: startup 0.10.0 is now on CRAN. If your R startup files (.Renviron and .Rprofile) get long and windy, or if you want to make parts of them public and other parts private, then you can use the startup package to split them up in separate files and directories under .Renviron.d/ and .Rprofile.d/. For instance, the .Rprofile.d/repos.R file can be solely dedicated to setting in the repos option, which specifies from which web servers R packages are installed from.

The future package defines the Future API, which is a unified, generic, friendly API for parallel processing. The Future API follows the principle of write code once and run anywhere - the developer chooses what to parallelize and the user how and where. The nature of a future is such that it lends itself to be used with several of the existing map-reduce frameworks already available in R. In this post, I’ll give an example of how to apply a function over a set of elements concurrently using plain sequential R, the parallel package, the future package alone, as well as future in combination of the foreach, the plyr, and the purrr packages.