[jira] [Created] (SPARK-17428) SparkR executors/workers support virtualenv

["Yanbo Liang (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

Yanbo Liang created SPARK-17428:
-----------------------------------

             Summary: SparkR executors/workers support virtualenv
                 Key: SPARK-17428
                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-17428
             Project: Spark
          Issue Type: New Feature
          Components: SparkR
            Reporter: Yanbo Liang


Many users have requirements to use third party R packages in executors/workers, but SparkR can not satisfy this requirements elegantly. For example, you should to mess with the IT/administrators of the cluster to deploy these R packages on each executors/workers node which is very inflexible.

I think we should support third party R packages for SparkR users as what we do for jar packages in the following two scenarios:
1, Users can install R packages from CRAN or custom CRAN-like repository for each executors.
2, Users can load their local R packages and install them on each executors.

To achieve this goal, the first thing is to make SparkR executors support virtualenv like Python conda. I have investigated and found packrat is one of the candidates to support virtualenv for R. Packrat is a dependency management system for R and can isolate the dependent R packages in its own private package space. Then SparkR users can install third party packages in the application scope(destroy after the application exit) and don’t need to bother IT/administrators to install these packages manually.



--
This message was sent by Atlassian JIRA
(v6.3.4#6332)

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: issues-unsubscribe@spark.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: issues-help@spark.apache.org