Parallel computing is supported in Signac through the future package, making it easy to specify different parallelization options. Here we demonstrate parallelization of the FeatureMatrix function and show some benchmark results to get a sense for the amount of speedup you might expect.

The Seurat package also uses future for parallelization, and you can see the Seurat vignette for more information.

The following functions currently enable parallelization in Signac:

  • Quantification (FeatureMatrix and related functions)
  • TSS enrichment
  • Footprinting
  • LinkPeaks

How to enable parallelization in Signac

Parallelization can be enabled simply by importing the future package and setting the plan.

## Warning: package 'future' was built under R version 4.3.3
## sequential:
## - args: function (..., envir = parent.frame())
## - tweaked: FALSE
## - call: NULL

By default the plan is set to sequential processing (no parallelization). We can change this to multicore or multisession to get asynchronous processing, and set the number of workers to change the number of cores used.

plan("multicore", workers = 10)
plan()
## multicore:
## - args: function (..., workers = 10, envir = parent.frame())
## - tweaked: TRUE
## - call: plan("multicore", workers = 10)

You might also need to increase the maximum memory usage:

options(future.globals.maxSize = 50 * 1024 ^ 3) # for 50 Gb RAM

Note that as of future version 1.14.0, forked processing is disabled when running in RStudio. To enable parallel computing in RStudio, you will need to select the “multisession” option.

Benchmarking

Here we demonstrate the runtime of FeatureMatrix run on 144,023 peaks for 9,688 human PBMCs under different parallelization options:

View benchmarking code

The following code was run on REHL with Intel Platinum 8268 CPU @ 2.00GHz

# download data
wget https://cf.10xgenomics.com/samples/cell-atac/2.0.0/atac_pbmc_10k_nextgem/atac_pbmc_10k_nextgem_fragments.tsv.gz
wget https://cf.10xgenomics.com/samples/cell-atac/2.0.0/atac_pbmc_10k_nextgem/atac_pbmc_10k_nextgem_fragments.tsv.gz.tbi
wget https://cf.10xgenomics.com/samples/cell-atac/2.0.0/atac_pbmc_10k_nextgem/atac_pbmc_10k_nextgem_peaks.bed
wget https://cf.10xgenomics.com/samples/cell-atac/2.0.0/atac_pbmc_10k_nextgem/atac_pbmc_10k_nextgem_singlecell.csv
library(Signac)

# load data
fragments <- "../vignette_data/atac_pbmc_10k_nextgem_fragments.tsv.gz"
peaks.10k <- read.table(
  file = "../vignette_data/atac_pbmc_10k_nextgem_peaks.bed",
  col.names = c("chr", "start", "end")
)
peaks <- GenomicRanges::makeGRangesFromDataFrame(peaks.10k)
md <- read.csv("../vignette_data/atac_pbmc_10k_nextgem_singlecell.csv", row.names = 1, header = TRUE)[-1, ]
cells <- rownames(md[md[['is__cell_barcode']] == 1, ])

fragments <- CreateFragmentObject(path = fragments, cells = cells, validate.fragments = FALSE)

# set number of replicates
nrep <- 5
results <- data.frame()
process_n <- 2000

# run sequentially
timing.sequential <- c()
for (i in seq_len(nrep)) {
  start <- Sys.time()
  fmat <- FeatureMatrix(fragments = fragments, features = peaks, cells = cells, process_n = process_n)
  timing.sequential <- c(timing.sequential, as.numeric(Sys.time() - start, units = "secs"))
}
res <- data.frame(
  "setting" = rep("Sequential", nrep),
  "cores" = rep(1, nrep),
  "replicate" = seq_len(nrep),
  "time" = timing.sequential
)
results <- rbind(results, res)

# 4 core
library(future)
plan("multicore", workers = 4)
options(future.globals.maxSize = 100000 * 1024^2)

timing.4core <- c()
for (i in seq_len(nrep)) {
  start <- Sys.time()
  fmat <- FeatureMatrix(fragments = fragments, features = peaks, cells = cells, process_n = process_n)
  timing.4core <- c(timing.4core, as.numeric(Sys.time() - start, units = "secs"))
}
res <- data.frame(
  "setting" = rep("Parallel", nrep),
  "cores" = rep(4, nrep),
  "replicate" = seq_len(nrep),
  "time" = timing.4core
)
results <- rbind(results, res)

# 10 core
plan("multicore", workers = 10)

timing.10core <- c()
for (i in seq_len(nrep)) {
  start <- Sys.time()
  fmat <- FeatureMatrix(fragments = fragments, features = peaks, cells = cells, process_n = process_n)
  timing.10core <- c(timing.10core, as.numeric(Sys.time() - start, units = "secs"))
}
res <- data.frame(
  "setting" = rep("Parallel", nrep),
  "cores" = rep(10, nrep),
  "replicate" = seq_len(nrep),
  "time" = timing.10core
)
results <- rbind(results, res)

# save results
write.table(
  x = results,
  file = paste0("../vignette_data/pbmc10k/timings_", Sys.Date(), ".tsv"),
  quote = FALSE,
  row.names = FALSE
)

Session Info
## R version 4.3.1 (2023-06-16)
## Platform: aarch64-apple-darwin20 (64-bit)
## Running under: macOS Sonoma 14.5
## 
## Matrix products: default
## BLAS:   /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.3-arm64/Resources/lib/libRblas.0.dylib 
## LAPACK: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.3-arm64/Resources/lib/libRlapack.dylib;  LAPACK version 3.11.0
## 
## locale:
## [1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8
## 
## time zone: Asia/Singapore
## tzcode source: internal
## 
## attached base packages:
## [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     
## 
## other attached packages:
## [1] ggplot2_3.5.1 future_1.34.0
## 
## loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
##  [1] gtable_0.3.5      jsonlite_1.8.8    highr_0.11        dplyr_1.1.4      
##  [5] compiler_4.3.1    tidyselect_1.2.1  parallel_4.3.1    jquerylib_0.1.4  
##  [9] globals_0.16.3    systemfonts_1.1.0 scales_1.3.0      textshaping_0.4.0
## [13] yaml_2.3.10       fastmap_1.2.0     R6_2.5.1          labeling_0.4.3   
## [17] generics_0.1.3    knitr_1.48        htmlwidgets_1.6.4 tibble_3.2.1     
## [21] desc_1.4.3        munsell_0.5.1     pillar_1.9.0      bslib_0.8.0      
## [25] rlang_1.1.4       utf8_1.2.4        cachem_1.1.0      xfun_0.47        
## [29] fs_1.6.4          sass_0.4.9        memoise_2.0.1     cli_3.6.3        
## [33] withr_3.0.1       pkgdown_2.0.9     magrittr_2.0.3    digest_0.6.37    
## [37] grid_4.3.1        lifecycle_1.0.4   vctrs_0.6.5       evaluate_0.24.0  
## [41] glue_1.7.0        farver_2.1.2      listenv_0.9.1     codetools_0.2-19 
## [45] ragg_1.3.2        fansi_1.0.6       parallelly_1.38.0 colorspace_2.1-1 
## [49] rmarkdown_2.28    purrr_1.0.2       pkgconfig_2.0.3   tools_4.3.1      
## [53] htmltools_0.5.8.1