This package is described in detail in the paper Software for Distributed Computation on Medical Databases: A Demonstration Project.
Install this package the usual way in R or via:
library(devtools)
install_github("bnaras/distcomp")
Then, you will find a document that describes several examples installed under the R library tree. For example:
list.files(system.file("doc", package = "distcomp"))
list.files(system.file("doc_src", package = "distcomp"))
The examples described in the reference below are available as follows:
list.files(system.file("ex", package = "distcomp"))
Use of this package requires some configuration. In particular, to
run the examples on a local machine where a single opencpu
server will be emulating several sites, a suitable R profile needs to be
set up. That profile will be something along the lines of
library(distcomp)
distcompSetup(workspace = "full_path_to_workspace_directory",
ssl_verifyhost = 0L, ssl_verifypeer = 0L)
where the workspace is a directory that the opencpu
server can serialize objects to. On Unix or Mac, the above can be
inserted into an .Rprofile
file, but on Windows, we find
that the Rprofile.site
file needs to contain the above
lines.
The effect of this is that every R process (including the
opencpu
process) has access to the distcomp
library and the workspace.
Refer to the vignette in the package for some tips on developing new distributed computations.
Balasubramanian Narasimhan and Daniel Rubin and Samuel Gross and Marina Bendersky and Philip Lavori. Software for Distributed Computation on Medical Databases: A Demonstration Project. Journal of Statistical Software, Volume 77, Issue 13, (2017). DOI