R: Load a 'bigMatrix' (deprecated)

load.bigMatrix {NetRep} | R Documentation

## Load a 'bigMatrix' (deprecated)

### Description

The `'bigMatrix'` class is no longer implemented in the `NetRep` package: the shared memory approach was incompatabile with high performance compute clusters, so the parallel permutation procedure has been translated into C++ code (which is also much faster). The `disk.matrix` class should now be used instead when analysing large datasets.

### Usage

    load.bigMatrix(backingfile)

### Arguments

`backingfile` | path to the backingfile for the `'bigMatrix'`. The file extension must be omitted.

### Details

This function will convert `'bigMatrix'` data saved by previous versions of NetRep to a serialized R matrix saved in the same location and return a `disk.matrix` object with the associated file path. If this conversion has taken place already the function will throw a warning.

This function will also convert the `'bigMatrix'` descriptor file to a `big.matrix` descriptor file to preserve compatability with functions in the bigmemory package. If this functionality is not required, the files with the extensions ".bin" and ".desc" may be removed.

A note for users using multi-node high performance clusters: `'big.matrix'` objects are not suitable for general usage. Access to file-backed shared memory segments on multi-node systems is very slow due to consistency checks performed by the operating system. This becomes exponentially worse the more R sessions there are simultaneously accessing the shared memory segment, e.g. through parallel foreach loops.

[Package NetRep version 1.2.4 Index]