A new version of the future package has been released and is available on CRAN. With futures, it is easy to write R code once, which later the user can choose to parallelize using whatever resources s/he has available, e.g. a local machine, a set of local notebooks, a set of remote machines, or a high-end compute cluster.
The future provides comfortable and friendly long-distance interactions.
The new version, future 1.
Unless you count DSC 2003 in Vienna, last week’s useR conference at Stanford was my very first time at useR. It was a great event, it was awesome to meet our lovely and vibrant R community in real life, which we otherwise only get know from online interactions, and of course it was very nice to meet old friends and make new ones.
The future is promising.
At the end of the second day, I presented A Future for R (18 min talk; slides below) on how you can use the future package for asynchronous (parallel and distributed) processing using a single unified API regardless of what backend you have available, e.