Using R in the institute

R is a programming language with easily installable extensions (a.k.a. "libraries" a.k.a. "packages"). Permanent Link:

Using R in the institute

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Multiple releases

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Several R releases are provided in parallel--you have to select beforehand. Up to including Linux platform generation 6, R was installed directly on workstations and computer servers while more recent releases could be selected explicitly. Since this caused confusion, R is no longer installed on workstations but has to always be selected explicitly.

• To simply run the the latest R release available:
  user@host > R+
  • This is not advised if you need stable results for your computations.
  • The latest R release will change from time to time.
• To identify the latest R release once and use it explicitly for whenever you run R:
  1. user@host> R+ --versions
  2. The latest available release is marked "default". Remember it (e.g. 4.2.0 ).
  3. Run the respective release explicitly:
     user@host> R+ --version 4.2.0
  4. Upon failure of running a specified R release, R+ won't continue but will fail hard to ensure you'll only do computations with your intended release version.

A Graphical environment

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RStudio is available on all institute computers. It works like this:

1. To do CPU intensive computations, select a compute server first:
   user@host > getserver -sL
2. Select an R release. Example:
   user@host > R+ --version 4.2.0
3. Run RStudio via the rstudio command.
4. This can be combined. Example:
   user@host > R+ --version 4.2.0 rstudio

Package management

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R+ used to just trust R to download, compile and install packages into the correct location. However, R doesn't know about multiple software platform generations being used with the same user account (e.g. G6 and G7). The R+ wrapper now has two modes:

1. Original R behavior of selecting package locations. This behavior has a serious downside: When moving to a new software platform, your libraries might stop working since system libraries changed.
2. Software platform aware behavior. R will keep a separate set of installed libraries per tuple (Software platform generation, R major release number, R minor release number). Example tuple: (G7,4,2) for R 4.2.1 (or R 4.2.2 or R 4.2.5) on generation 7 computers.
   In short: You want that behavior.

R+ tries to enable the platform aware behavior. These conditions have to be satisfied:

• You have a personal software folder. If you don't, create one here.
• There are NO packages currently installed in the respective original location.
  If you're willing to re-install the packages, you're currently using, the easiest way to achieve that is to remove the R folder in your home directory. If you're unsure, rename it. If you removed it and regret it later, write a ticket and ask IT to restore if from backup.

R+ will test all conditions on startup and switch to software platform aware behavior, if possible. It will fallback to original behavior, if not all the conditions are satisfied.