HenrikBengtsson / article-bengtsson-future

H. Bengtsson, A Unifying Framework for Parallel and Distributed Processing in R using Futures, The R Journal, 10.32614/RJ-2021-048, 2021

Article 'A Unifying Framework for Parallel and Distributed Processing in R using Futures'

H. Bengtsson, A Unifying Framework for Parallel and Distributed Processing in R using Futures, arXiv:2008.00553, 2021

Abstract:
A future is a programming construct designed for concurrent and asynchronous evaluation of code, making it particularly useful for parallel processing. The future package implements the Future API for programming with futures in R. This minimal API provides sufficient constructs for implementing parallel versions of well-established, high-level map-reduce APIs. The future ecosystem supports exception handling, output and condition relaying, parallel random number generation, and automatic identification of globals lowering the threshold to parallelize code. The Future API bridges parallel frontends with parallel backends following the philosophy that end-users are the ones who choose the parallel backend while the developer focuses on what to parallelize. A variety of backends exist and third-party contributions meeting the specifications, which ensure that the same code works on all backends, are automatically supported. The future framework solves several problems not addressed by other parallel frameworks in R.

Status: Accepted (The R Journal)
Download: PDF (latest version; newer that prepublication)
Prepublication: PDF (v4 from 2021-11-11)
Feedback: https://github.com/HenrikBengtsson/article-bengtsson-future/issues
Changelog: CHANGELOG

Please cite this article when using the future package or the future framework as:

@article{bengtsson-future,
  author = {Henrik Bengtsson},
  title = {{A Unifying Framework for Parallel and Distributed Processing
          in R using Futures}},
  year = {2021},
  journal = {{The R Journal}},
  doi = {10.32614/RJ-2021-048},
  url = {https://journal.r-project.org/archive/2021/RJ-2021-048/index.html}
}

Instructions

Edit and view locally

To compile the LaTeX document ('bengtsson-future.tex') into a PDF ('RJwrapper.pdf'), do:

$ make

To view it locally:

$ make view

To cleanup and start from scratch, do:

$ make clean

The R Journal

To build a tarball to be sent to The R Journal, do:

$ make submit

arXiv

To build the arXiv PDF without the R Journal header and footer, do:

$ make arxiv

To build the minimal tarball to be uploaded to arXiv, do:

$ make arxiv.tar.gz