Roadmap: Introduction to R
This roadmap provides a brief introduction to R. It covers the basic syntax of the language and illustrates some of its data handling and statistical capabilities. The focus will be on how to run R in various environments, particularly on TACC's Frontera supercomputer, and especially how to run R in parallel. It is by no means a comprehensive discussion of R. Instead refer to the various manuals available on the R website, or one of the many books on R.
Objectives
After you complete this roadmap, you should be able to:
- Download and install R Studio
- Use basic syntax in R
- Describe data structures in R
- Explain basic statistical analysis procedures using R
Prerequisites
This roadmap assumes the reader has no prior experience with R. The exercises and examples assume some familiarity with statistical analysis and working through the exercises on Frontera requires a basic knowledge of Linux and the ability to access these systems via SSH.
Carrying out activities on Frontera will require an appropriate TACC allocation. As an alternative, some activities could be carried out on a local installation of R and others on another HPC resource with Slurm and R installed.
Requirements
You can follow some topics in the roadmap using R installed on your own computer. To install R on your own computer, we recommend:
- A computer less than 10 years old with an Intel-compatible or Apple processor
- At least 4 GB of RAM
Other sections of the roadmap demonstrate how to use R on a high performance computing system. To follow these examples, you will need
- Access to Frontera over SSH and an appropriate TACC allocation.
or
- Access to a different HPC resource with Slurm and R installed.