Loading an R Module

To use R on the ARC systems you simply need to load the latest R environment module, in this example version 4.1.2 - it can be loaded using the following command:

module load R/4.1.2-foss-2021b-ARC

To see all versions of R we have available, use the command

module spider R

The base install has many popular R packages installed. Additionally there are modules available with the -ARC suffix e.g. R/4.1.2-foss-2021b-ARC these modules load many more R libraries than the base R installation and contains those libraries most requested by ARC users. It is possible that you will need access to libraries which are not installed in the base or ARC R modules. You can install R libraries in an R library repository within your storage area (e.g. $HOME or $DATA) please see below.

Please note: Some R libraries depend on the existence of non-R applications or other shared binaries. Attempting to install an R library with binary dependencies may fail. In this case please contact the ARC team and we will install the dependencies for you centrally.

Typical R submission script

The following is an example of a typical R submission script for ARC:

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH --nodes=1
#SBATCH --ntasks-per-node=1
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task=8
#SBATCH --partition=short
#SBATCH --time=12:00:00
#SBATCH --job-name=Rtest

module purge
module load  R/4.1.2-foss-2021b-ARC

Rscript --no-restore --no-save r_script.R

The script above requests a single node and 8 cores. You will need to ensure your R script is written using R parallel libraries in order to make use of these CPU resources.