Partitioning Data For Performance Improvement In R

John Mount shares a few examples of partitioning and parallelizing data operations in R:

In this note we will show how to speed up work in R by partitioning data and process-level parallelization. We will show the technique with three different R packages: rqdatatable, data.table, and dplyr. The methods shown will also work with base-R and other packages.

For each of the above packages we speed up work by using wrapr::execute_parallel which in turn uses wrapr::partition_tables to partition un-related data.frame rows and then distributes them to different processors to be executed. rqdatatable::ex_data_table_parallelconveniently bundles all of these steps together when working with rquery pipelines.

There were some interesting results.  I expected data.table to be fast, but did not expect dplyr to parallelize so well.