R

Overview

• R: is a programming language and free software environment for statistical computing and graphics supported by the R Foundation for Statistical Computing. The R language is widely used among statisticians and data miners for developing statistical software and data analysis. Below are links to pages that are related to R. R is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It compiles and runs on a wide variety of UNIX platforms, Windows and macOS.

Using

Use the module name r to discover versions available and to load the application.

Multicore

Typically, using parallel::detectCores() to detect the number of available cores on a cluster node is a slight red herring. This returns the entire total number of cores of the node your job is allocated and not the actual number of cores you requested/allocated. For example, if you're sbatch script defines the following,

#SBATCH --nodes=1
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task=8

and you're allocated a standard Teton node that have 32 cores, parallel::detectCores() will return a value of 32 and not 8 which is what you requested!
This will probably lead to unexpected results/failures when you try and run a function expecting 32 cores when only 8 are actually available.
To remove this problem you can use, and need to pass into your R script, the value of the $SLURM_JOB_CPUS_PER_NODE slurm environment variable.

Example

Batch Script: (fragments of what your script might look like):

#!/bin/bash
...
#SBATCH --nodes=1
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task=8
...
echo "SLURM_JOB_CPUS_PER_NODE:" $SLURM_JOB_CPUS_PER_NODE
...
module load swset/2018.05 gcc/7.3.0 r/3.6.1
...
Rscript multiple_cpu_test.R $SLURM_JOB_CPUS_PER_NODE
...

R Script: multiple_cpu_test.R

args <- commandArgs(trailingOnly = TRUE)
if (!is.na(args[1])) {
  num_of_cores <- args[1]
  print(paste0("Num of Cores: ", num_of_cores))
}

print(paste0("detectCores: ", parallel::detectCores()))

options(mc.cores = num_of_cores)
print(paste0("mc.cores: ", getOption("mc.cores", 1L)))

Slurm Output:

SLURM_JOB_CPUS_PER_NODE: 8
...
[1] "Num of Cores: 8"
[1] "detectCores: 32"
[1] "mc.cores: 8"