In partnership with researchers in the Center for Public Health Genomics, School of Medicine Research Computing has contributed to the development of a novel package for computationally efficient caching and loading of data in R. simpleCache provides an interface to a series of functions to store and retrieve cached objects, including in the context batch processing or HPC environments. The package further extends base R functionality of saving and loading external representations of objects by enabling caching to pre-defined directories and timed cache operations.

RC helped document and develop new functions for the package ahead of its release to the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN). An accompanying article was selected for publication in the Journal of Open Source Software in early 2018.

https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=simpleCache

PI: Nathan Sheffield (Center for Public Health Genomics)