Async and Parallel R: Building the Open Source Tools. A Webinar by the Statistical Computing and Visualisation section

The Statistical Computing and Visualisation section of the Statistical Society of Australia proudly presents an Invited Speaker webinar titled "Async and Parallel R: Building the Open Source Tools" delivered by Charlie Gao, Senior Software Engineer at Posit (formerly RStudio).

Date: Thursday 22 October 2026

Time: 6:00pm - 7:00pm (AEDT)

Format: Online via Zoom. Details provided upon registration

Abstract: Async and Parallel R: Building the Open Source Tools

Simulation studies, bootstrapping, cross-validation, MCMC - statistical computing is full of work that could run in parallel, yet parallel R too often means a blocked session, a copy of your data on every worker, and code rewritten for each new environment. Over several years I've built the layers needed to fix this: a messaging substrate for reliable async I/O, a framework for async and parallel computing on top of it, and a way to share R objects across processes without copying. This talk is a practical tour of that stack from laptop to HPC cluster, with patterns you can apply to your own analyses straight away, plus a closing look at where the zero-copy model is headed next.

Key Learnings

Attendees will:

• Recognise the parallelism already in their workflows — simulation studies, bootstrap, cross-validation, multiple chains — and the two costs that usually cap it: blocked sessions and copied data.
• Run R code in parallel with mirai in a few lines, then scale the identical code to their own servers, HPC schedulers or the cloud by changing one line of configuration.
• Keep large data in one place with mori: `share()` a dataset once so every worker maps the same memory instead of holding a private copy.
• Keep interactive sessions and Shiny apps responsive while heavy computation runs, using event-driven async instead of batch-and-wait.
• Know where to start on their own projects: both packages are on CRAN, with a mechanical migration path from existing parallel/future code.

Presenter Bio: Charlie Gao

Charlie Gao is a Senior Software Engineer at Posit (formerly RStudio), where he builds open-source tools for data science and technical communication. He is the author of mirai — R's modern framework for async and parallel computing, now the shared backend behind Shiny, plumber2, purrr, tidymodels, and targets — and mori, which brings zero-copy shared memory to R. Recent speaking engagements include posit::conf(2025) in Atlanta, Japan R 2025 (keynote), and useR! 2026 in Warsaw. He is also a member of the Quarto core team, developing Quarto 2 — the next version of Posit's authoring system, designed for collaboration at its heart.