batchtools local and interactive futures — batchtools

A batchtools local future is an synchronous uniprocess future that will be evaluated in a background R session. A batchtools interactive future is an synchronous uniprocess future that will be evaluated in the current R session (and variables will be assigned to the calling environment rather than to a local one). Both types of futures will block until the futures are resolved.

batchtools_local(..., envir = parent.frame())

Arguments

envir: The environment in which global environment should be located.
...: Additional arguments passed to BatchtoolsUniprocessFuture().

Value

An object of class BatchtoolsUniprocessFuture.

Details

batchtools local futures rely on the batchtools backend set up by batchtools::makeClusterFunctionsInteractive(external = TRUE) and batchtools interactive futures on the one set up by batchtools::makeClusterFunctionsInteractive(). These are supported by all operating systems.

An alternative to batchtools local futures is to use cluster futures of the future package with a single local background session, i.e. plan(cluster, workers = "localhost").

An alternative to batchtools interactive futures is to use plan(sequential, split = TRUE) futures of the future package.

Examples

## Use local batchtools futures
plan(batchtools_local)

## A global variable
a <- 1

## Create explicit future
f <- future({
  b <- 3
  c <- 2
  a * b * c
})
v <- value(f)
print(v)
#> [1] 6


## Create implicit future
v %<-% {
  b <- 3
  c <- 2
  a * b * c
}
print(v)
#> [1] 6