> I am new to R and have created an application using R 2.10, with a graphical > UI using TclTk 8.5, running on windows 7, quad core machine. > The intention of the application is to launch calculations and display > results on a graphical dashboard. > > I've reached a roadblock, and I need to confirm that the following CANNOT be > done. I've been trying to find a mechanism for doing the following: > > 1. From the dashboard, start a huge calculation (i.e. call a function) that > take at least 30 seconds to run, but without tying up the other dashboard > features > 2. Dashboard can detect when the calculation is finished > 3. Dashboard can display incremental results as the calculation runs (i.e. > status/progress) > > The requirement is to kickoff 4 calculations (#1), but I don't want the user > to wait for the others to finish. > The calculations are not dependent. I just need to display results. > > I've been reading that threading in R is not an option. I tried using the > multicore package, but that is still synchronous. I looked at multicore, > fork(), addTaskCallback(), and TclTk threading, and none of these seem like > an option. > > Is there a way to launch multiple R scripts from controller that can > communicate back and forth? I believe this means that the separate processes > are able to communicate. > > I certainly appreciate any direction you can provide. I really want to find > some good news to tell the boss, though, since we went down this path before > realizing the limitations.
Another option to consider is moving to a client/server architecture. Even if the dashboard and the R engine are on the same machine now, in the future you might want to deploy the dashboard to the web (or other client) to make it available to a wider audience. This also might make the asynchronous communication easier to manage, and offload computations from the client machine. There are several options out there, including: - Rserve, open source project maintained by Simon Urbanek. http://rosuda.org/Rserve/ - Biocep-R. http://biocep-distrib.r-forge.r-project.org/. Also open source. - Spotfire Statistics Services: commercial solution from TIBCO (my company), that providers server access to a cluster of R and S+ engines via Java and C# APIs. http://spotfire.tibco.com/products/statistics-services/predictive-analytics.aspx Good luck, Lou -------------------------- Lou Bajuk-Yorgan Sr. Director, Product Management Spotfire, TIBCO Software 206-802-2328 lba...@tibco.com http://spotfire.tibco.com TIBCO Spotfire Analytics Better than BI. Smarter than Spreadsheets. (click here for the Top 5 reasons why...) ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
