Programming with BIG data in R: Scaling analytics from one to thousands of nodes

Journal Article · Wed Nov 09 00:00:00 EST 2016 · Big Data Research

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bdr.2016.10.002· OSTI ID:1333101

Schmidt, Drew ^[1]; Chen, Wei -Chen ^[2]; Matheson, Michael A. ^[3]; Ostrouchov, George ^[4]

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1. Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN (United States)
2. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Silver Spring, MD (United States)
3. Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
4. Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN (United States); Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)

Here, we present a tutorial overview showing how one can achieve scalable performance with R. We do so by utilizing several package extensions, including those from the pbdR project. These packages consist of high performance, high-level interfaces to and extensions of MPI, PBLAS, ScaLAPACK, I/O libraries, profiling libraries, and more. While these libraries shine brightest on large distributed platforms, they also work rather well on small clusters and often, surprisingly, even on a laptop with only two cores. Our tutorial begins with recommendations on how to get more performance out of your R code before considering parallel implementations. Because R is a high-level language, a function can have a deep hierarchy of operations. For big data, this can easily lead to inefficiency. Profiling is an important tool to understand the performance of an R code for both serial and parallel improvements.

• Research Organization: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States). Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF); Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States). Joint Institute for Computational Sciences (JICS)
• Sponsoring Organization: Work for Others (WFO); USDOE Office of Science (SC)
• Grant/Contract Number: AC05-00OR22725
• OSTI ID: 1333101
• Alternate ID(s): OSTI ID: 1416808
• Journal Information: Big Data Research, Journal Name: Big Data Research; ISSN 2214-5796
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING