This package was developed as a proof of concept to determine if geotrellis could be leveraged to provide greater performance for processing spatial data sets. Generally, this package seems to be comparable to the raster package, but there is little to no benefit in most cases. I would not recommend this package for any real analysis.

Benchmark comparing functions from the geotrellis and raster R packages.

Installation

This package requires Java version 8. Check what version you have installed using the following system command javac -version. If you see 1.8.0+ then you’re good to go. Otherwise, you need to update Java. Note that this might cause problems with other programs installed on your computer. Do this at your own risk.

To update Java on Ubuntu (14.04 LTS) using the following system commands:

echo "deb https://dl.bintray.com/sbt/debian /" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sbt.list
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv 642AC823
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-set-default

To update Java on Mac OSX (Mavericks) using the following system commands:

brew update
brew cask install java

To install the development version from GitHub, use this R code:

if (!require('devtools'))
  install.packages('devtools', repo='http://cran.rstudio.com', dep=TRUE)
devtools:::install_github('jeffreyhanson/geotrellis')

Once this package has been installed, you can read through the vignette for a tutorial on how to use it.

View it here, or by running this code in R:

vignette('geotrellis', package='geotrellis')