[R] running R commands asynchronously

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Fri, 10 Jun 2011, Greg Snow wrote:

> Tk windows run asynchronous to the rest of R, so you could write a 
> small function that lets you type the command into a Tk window and 
> runs it while you continue to work in the main R, then the window 
> could signal you when the function finishes.

That is really not advised.  R is not designed to run asynchronous R 
commands and is not protected against quite a lot of things which can 
happen if you try that (many low-level routines are not re-entrant, 
for example).  Allowing callbacks to either run simple things (as 
happens from e.g. the GUI menus) whilst a task is running, or to do 
almost all the running (as happens with a menu system built in Tk) is 
fairly safe just because only one task is likely to run at a time.

For over a decade Duncan TL has promised a facility to run tasks in 
parallel in R (as I recall the estimate at DSC 2001 was 12 months).

So the only safe way at present (and the foreseeable future) is to run 
separate processes.  Packages snow and multicore provide means to do 
that (and to wait for and collect results): in the case of multicore 
the parallel tasks work on a copy of the current session and so you do 
come close to the appearance of running aysnchronous tasks.  (By 
choosing to use Windows you exclude yourself from multicore.)

>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of Richard M. Heiberger
> Sent: Friday, June 10, 2011 3:30 PM
> To: r-help
> Subject: [R] running R commands asynchronously
>
> I am interested in running R commands asynchronously.
>
> My first choice is in the same R session that I am currently in.
> Here, the goal would be to run something like
>
>     RunAsynchSameSession(myfunction(), "outputname.rda")
>
> Once RunAsynchSameSession had started myfunction(),
> RunAsynchSameSession would complete immediately.  myfunction would
> keep going.  It is OK if execution of the myfunction() command
> prevents new input to R until it has completed.  The important feature
> is that RunAsynchSameSession must tell the progam that called it that
> it was done.
>
> Second choice is to start an independent process, BATCH or something
> similar, and save the resulting data objects in an .rda file.
>
>     RunAsynchBatch("myfile.r", "outputname.rda")
>
> The RunAsynchBatch would start a batch process and complete
> immediately after starting the batch file.  The batch file would run
> independently until it was completed.  While I know how to do this,
> for example with system(wait=FALSE), I would appreciate seeing a
> worked collection of statements, including getting outputname.rda back
> to the original R session.  I am working on Windows.
>
> Rich

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595