Charlie Gao: ‘mirai’ for Shiny and Plumber Applications

‘mirai’ is Japanese for ‘future’. Some of the existing solutions for parallelization in R have not fundamentally changed in 20 years. The technologies behind ‘mirai’ are, in contrast, modern and minimalist, and provide a level of performance that will be noticeable for demanding, client.facing workloads typical of Shiny and Plumber applications.As a scheduler for distributed tasks, ‘mirai’ currently powers the high performance computing needs for the ‘targets’ reproducible.workflow ecosystem, whether locally, on traditional HPC clusters or the cloud. It has undergone the validation required to reliably handle demand.ing scientific workloads such as clinical trials simulations. At R Project Sprint 2023, it was integrated as a backend for the base R ‘parallel’ package at the request of R.Core.The same industrial.strength, yet incredibly lightweight solution is now available to power large.scale Shiny and Plumber applications.This presentation demonstrates how ‘mirai’ works in typical example situations which benefit from parallelization of computations, and the different ways they may be distributed to background processes on the same machine or across a network of servers.A particular highlight will be the zero.configuration TLS option. This ‘just works’ to protect remote connections using single.use certificates generated on-the-fly. This was developed under an R Consortium infrastructure grant that aims to make such technologies available to the wider R community. ------------- SatRdays London 2024 conference sponsored by - Jumping Rivers - Kings College London - CUSP London (Centre for Urban Science and Progress) - R Consortium