[Bioc-devel] BiocParallel on Windows Never Ends

[Dario Strbenac]

Good day,

I was interested how the performance of my package is on a 32-bit Windows computer because I'm going to give a workshop about it soon and some people might bring old laptops. I found that using SnowParam with workers set to more than 1 never finishes. The minimal code to cause the issue is:

bplapply(1:10, function(i) LETTERS[i], BPPARAM = SnowParam(workers = 1)) # Immediately returns a result.
bplapply(1:10, function(i) LETTERS[i], BPPARAM = SnowParam(workers = 2)) # Never completes.

> sessionInfo()
R version 3.5.0 (2018-04-23)
Platform: i386-w64-mingw32/i386 (32-bit)
Running under: Windows 7 (build 7601) Service Pack 1

Matrix products: default

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_Australia.1252  LC_CTYPE=English_Australia.1252    LC_MONETARY=English_Australia.1252 LC_NUMERIC=C                      
[5] LC_TIME=English_Australia.1252    

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

other attached packages:
[1] BiocParallel_1.14.1

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] compiler_3.5.0 snow_0.4-2     parallel_3.5.0

--------------------------------------
Dario Strbenac
University of Sydney
Camperdown NSW 2050
Australia