R Tool - AMP Engine

[craigbeach]

Hello team,

I am using an iterative macro to generate statistical sales forecasts iteratively on subsets of my data. I have an R Tool embedded in the iterative macro with different predictive methods. The macro is pretty lightweight and mainly is just the R tool. I don't use the existing time series tools because I wanted more forecasting methods and my outputs formatted a certain way. 

Here are the facts on my current state situation and what I am looking for in my future state situation. I think AMP Engine could the solution, but I am have not seen the results by enabling the engine in my workflow and I do not see any documentation or other threads addressing the R Tool with AMP engine.

Current State:

Forecast at business segment and item family level

300,000 records

~3000 iterations per workflow run

3 seconds per iteration

~3 hours workflow run time

Ideal Future State:

Forecast at business segment, item family, distributor, customer level

6.7 mil records

435,000 iterations per workflow

Minimal iteration time

These iterations would take the workflow 15 days to run given current iteration time/specs. 

Not sure if I'm a mad man for wanting these gains. The AMP engine seems to be the ticket to solving this problem using Alteryx though. I have 12 worker threads and 15.6GB RAM available for my workflow on my desktop. I can get more than that on my company's Alteryx server. Dividing the iterations by 12 (given the worker threads available), it would take only 30 hours to realize the 435K iterations if 3 seconds per iteration.

The R Tool doesn't appear to be leveraging the AMP engine. Am I correct in this assessment (no information on the wiki)? Is there a plan to add the R tool in the future? Does anyone have an ideas on how to speed up these iterations? I have loosely looked into the handoff between R and Alteryx being less efficient, so that may be an opportunity for gains.

I appreciate any insight! I can't share the workflow due to company IP, but I can answer questions.

[ArtApa]

Hi @craigbeach - I don't think that I will be able to fully answer your question, but I hope to address it at least partly.

Firstly, if you haven't already, please review our articles related to using the new AMP Engine:

https://help.alteryx.com/current/designer/alteryx-amp-engine 
https://help.alteryx.com/current/designer/Alteryx-Engine-and-AMP-Main-Differences 
https://help.alteryx.com/current/designer/AMP-Memory-Use 
https://help.alteryx.com/current/designer/tool-use-amp 

Secondly, R Predictive Tools are essentially macros that consist of multiple tools. Some of these tools are converted to use the AMP engine. 

[craigbeach]

Hey @ArtApa - I appreciate the response. 

I did read the articles and the R Tool wasn't covered in there or in any thread I could find, thus why I'm reaching out.

I'm talking about the "R Tool" - the tool that executes R code. Not the R Predictive Tools, which are macros with the R Tool & other logic embedded in them (as you mentioned). 

[AndrewKramer · Accepted solution]

The R Tool does not currently use the AMP Engine. Thanks for the great description of how AMP support would be valuable for your use case. Our products team is constantly reviewing customer feedback to determine future enhancements!

[patrick_digan]

@AndrewKramer Quick question, when you say the R tool doesn't use the AMP engine, am I correct in thinking that it should fall back to e1 and still produce results as expected? For a simple use case, the HMAC encrypt macro "completes" but doesn't have any results when I check the AMP box. I would have expected it to still work when the AMP box is checked. I've put in a support ticket, but figured I would post here as well. I've attached my simple workflow which works on e1 but doesn't produce results when AMP is checked. Thanks!

cc: @mooster71 

[AndrewKramer]

Hi @patrick_digan ,

The default functionality is to default back to e1, even if AMP is selected. Looks like this may not be the case here - thanks for going ahead and opening the support ticket. That will allow us to diagnose further.

Thanks

[mooster71]

I also raised a ticket with support and they confirm it is a known issue: "The behavior you are encountering is currently a known product defect, DE27638 and has been added to our engineering team's backlog. At this time I can't provide timeline for any potential fix, and defects are often reprioritize alongside other development efforts."

[TonyaS]

Hello All, 

Thank you for being early adopters of the new AMP Engine! We appreciate your feedback.

This issue was recently identified internally and fixed. The fix will be included in the 2020.4 Release. 

I encourage you to continue to report any use case issues that you find with running workflows with AMP Engine enabled. We worked hard to identify differences from the original Engine as well as provide guidance on how to better optimize workflows to run with AMP. 

[TonyaS]

An update for anyone on this post, the R tools are now supported on AMP Engine with the 2022.3 Release version.