Designed for simplicity, a 'mirai' evaluates an R expression asynchronously in a parallel process, locally or distributed over the network, with the result automatically available upon completion. Modern networking and concurrency built on 'nanonext' and 'NNG' (Nanomsg Next Gen) ensure reliable and efficient scheduling, over fast inter-process communications or TCP/IP secured by TLS. Advantages include being inherently queued thus handling many more tasks than available processes, no storage on the file system, support for otherwise non-exportable reference objects, an event-driven promises implementation, and built-in asynchronous parallel map.
Notes
For local mirai requests, the default transport for inter-process communications is platform-dependent: abstract Unix domain sockets on Linux, Unix domain sockets on MacOS, Solaris and other POSIX platforms, and named pipes on Windows.
This may be overriden, if desired, by specifying 'url' in the
daemons interface and launching daemons using
launch_local.
Author
Charlie Gao charlie.gao@shikokuchuo.net (ORCID)