Apply a Function over a List or Vector via Futures
future_lapply(x, FUN, ..., future.globals = TRUE, future.packages = NULL,
future.seed = FALSE, future.lazy = FALSE, future.scheduling = 1)
A vector-like object to iterate over.
A function taking at least one argument.
(optional) Additional arguments pass to FUN()
.
A logical, a character vector, or a named list for controlling how globals are handled. For details, see below section.
(optional) a character vector specifying packages to be attached in the R environment evaluating the future.
A logical or an integer (of length one or seven),
or a list of length(x)
with pre-generated random seeds.
For details, see below section.
Specifies whether the futures should be resolved lazily or eagerly (default).
Average number of futures ("chunks") per worker.
If 0.0
, then a single future is used to process all elements
of x
.
If 1.0
or TRUE
, then one future per worker is used.
If 2.0
, then each worker will process two futures
(if there are enough elements in x
).
If Inf
or FALSE
, then one future per element of
x
is used.
A list with same length and names as x
.
Argument future.globals
may be used to control how globals
should be handled similarly how the globals
argument is used with
future()
.
Since all function calls use the same set of globals, this function can do
any gathering of globals upfront (once), which is more efficient than if
it would be done for each future independently.
If TRUE
, NULL
or not is specified (default), then globals
are automatically identified and gathered.
If a character vector of names is specified, then those globals are gathered.
If a named list, then those globals are used as is.
In all cases, FUN
and any ...
arguments are automatically
passed as globals to each future created as they are always needed.
Unless future.seed = FALSE
, this function guarantees to generate
the exact same sequence of random numbers given the same initial
seed / RNG state - this regardless of type of futures and scheduling
("chunking") strategy.
RNG reproducibility is achieved by pregenerating the random seeds for all
iterations (over x
) by using L'Ecuyer-CMRG RNG streams. In each
iteration, these seeds are set before calling FUN(x[[ii]], ...)
.
Note, for large length(x)
this may introduce a large overhead.
As input (future.seed
), a fixed seed (integer) may be given, either
as a full L'Ecuyer-CMRG RNG seed (vector of 1+6 integers) or as a seed
generating such a full L'Ecuyer-CMRG seed.
If future.seed = TRUE
, then .Random.seed
is returned if it holds a L'Ecuyer-CMRG RNG seed, otherwise one is created
randomly.
If future.seed = NA
, a L'Ecuyer-CMRG RNG seed is randomly created.
If none of the function calls FUN(x[[i]], ...)
uses random number
generation, then future.seed = FALSE
may be used.
In addition to the above, it is possible to specify a pre-generated
sequence of RNG seeds as a list such that
length(future.seed) == length(x)
and where each element is an
integer seed that can be assigned to .Random.seed
.
Use this alternative with caution.
Note that as.list(seq_along(x)) is not a valid set of such
.Random.seed
values.
In all cases but future.seed = FALSE
, the RNG state of the calling
R processes after this function returns is guaranteed to be
"forwarded one step" from the RNG state that was before the call and
in the same way regardless of future.seed
, future.scheduling
and future strategy used. This is done in order to guarantee that an R
script calling future_lapply()
multiple times should be numerically
reproducible given the same initial seed.
# NOT RUN {
## Regardless of the future plan, the number of workers,
## and where they are, the random numbers will be identical
plan(sequential)
y1 <- future_lapply(1:5, FUN = rnorm, future.seed = 0xBEEF)
str(y1)
plan(multiprocess)
y2 <- future_lapply(1:5, FUN = rnorm, future.seed = 0xBEEF)
str(y2)
stopifnot(all.equal(y1, y2))
# }
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