ondisc: Algorithms and Data Structures for Large Single-Cell Expression Matrices

Single-cell datasets are growing in size, posing challenges as well as opportunities for genomics researchers. 'ondisc' is an R package that facilitates analysis of large-scale single-cell data out-of-core on a laptop or distributed across tens to hundreds of processors on a cluster or cloud. In both of these settings, 'ondisc' requires only a few gigabytes of memory, even if the input data are tens of gigabytes in size. 'ondisc' mainly is oriented toward single-cell CRISPR screen analysis, but also can be used for single-cell differential expression and single-cell co-expression analyses. 'ondisc' is powered by several new, efficient algorithms for manipulating and querying large, sparse expression matrices.

Version: 1.3.5
Depends: R (≥ 4.1.0)
Imports: crayon, data.table, methods, Rcpp, Rhdf5lib, dplyr, readr, Matrix
LinkingTo: Rcpp, Rhdf5lib
Suggests: sessioninfo, knitr, R.utils, rmarkdown, testthat (≥ 3.0.0)
Published: 2026-06-17
DOI: 10.32614/CRAN.package.ondisc
Author: Timothy Barry ORCID iD [aut, cre], Songcheng Dai [ctb], Yixuan Qiu [ctb], Eugene Katsevich [aut, ths]
Maintainer: Timothy Barry <tbarry at hsph.harvard.edu>
BugReports: https://github.com/timothy-barry/ondisc/issues
License: MIT + file LICENSE
URL: https://timothy-barry.github.io/ondisc/, https://timothy-barry.github.io/sceptre-book/
NeedsCompilation: yes
SystemRequirements: GNU make
Materials: README, NEWS
CRAN checks: ondisc results

Documentation:

Reference manual: ondisc.html , ondisc.pdf
Vignettes: Getting started with ondisc (source, R code)

Downloads:

Package source: ondisc_1.3.5.tar.gz
Windows binaries: r-devel: not available, r-release: ondisc_1.3.5.zip, r-oldrel: not available
macOS binaries: r-release (arm64): ondisc_1.3.5.tgz, r-oldrel (arm64): ondisc_1.3.5.tgz, r-release (x86_64): ondisc_1.3.5.tgz, r-oldrel (x86_64): ondisc_1.3.5.tgz
Old sources: ondisc archive

Linking:

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