rush

Package website: release | dev

rush is an R package for asynchronous and decentralized optimization. It uses a database-centric architecture in which workers communicate through a shared Redis database. To support high-throughput workloads, rush combines sub-millisecond per-task overhead with caching strategies that reduce database operations. The package integrates with the mlr3 ecosystem and serves as the backend for asynchronous optimization algorithms in bbotk and mlr3tuning.

Features

• Database-centric architecture for decentralized optimization without a central controller.
• Asynchronous communication between workers using Redis.
• Sub-millisecond per-task overhead for high-throughput workloads.
• Efficient caching mechanism that minimizes database read/write operations.
• Task queue support for centralized tasks distribution when needed.
• Fast data transformation from Redis to data.table.
• Scales to large remote worker networks via the mirai package.
• Worker logging directly into the Redis database using lgr.
• Minimal dependencies for lightweight integration.

Install

Install the latest release from CRAN.

install.packages("rush")

Install the development version from GitHub.

# pak::pak("mlr-org/rush")
install.packages("rush", repos = c('https://mlr-org.r-universe.dev', 'https://cloud.r-project.org'))

And install Redis.

Test with Redis

To test the package, set the RUSH_TEST_USE_REDIS environment variable to true. The test suite deletes the Redis database before execution, so never run it against a production server.

Sys.setenv(RUSH_TEST_USE_REDIS = "true")

Citation

If you use rush, please cite our paper.

Becker M, Bischl B (2026). “rush: Scalable Asynchronous Distributed Computing via Shared State in R.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.21430. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.21430.

@misc{becker2026rush,
  title = {rush: {{Scalable Asynchronous Distributed Computing}} via {{Shared State}} in {{R}}},
  shorttitle = {rush},
  author = {Becker, Marc and Bischl, Bernd},
  year = 2026,
  month = jun,
  number = {arXiv:2606.21430},
  eprint = {2606.21430},
  primaryclass = {cs.DC},
  publisher = {arXiv},
  doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2606.21430},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv}
}

Related Work

• future
• mirai
• batchtools
• crew
• rrq