How to reduce the occupied RAM when you are dealing with a very sparse matrix in a single-cell Experiment in R? I'm dealing with a very large and sparse dataset and the first issues I met occurred when I tried to use quickCluster that reported me this error:
                'cannot allocate vector of size 156.6 Mb'

So, given that I cannot wait to change the RAM of my computer and I can't afford to use a cluster, I want to rely on some other strategies like some package that would allow me to handle sparse matrices. I'm thinking about sparseM but given that I don't know well this package I'd like to know how to shrink the ram allocation for these kind of matrices. Any suggestion will be very appreciated!
Link to the dataset
Ah, looks like I can't even procrastinate on StackExchange anymore without seeing work-related stuff. Oh well.
Anyway, the other answers and comments are way off. scran has supported sparse matrices for years, ever since we switched over to the SingleCellExperiment class as our basic data structure. quickCluster does no coercion to dense format unless you tell it so explicitly, e.g., with use.ranks=TRUE (in which case you're asking for ranks, so there's little choice but to collapse to a dense matrix).
You don't provide an MWE or your session information, but this is how it rolls for me:
# Using the raw counts in the linked dataset. Despite being
# called a CSV, it's actually space delimited... typical.
library(scater)
mat &lt;- readSparseCounts(&quot;GBM_raw_gene_counts.csv&quot;, sep=&quot; &quot;)

# Making an SCE just for fun. Not strictly necessary for
# this example, but you'll find it useful later. 
sce &lt;- SingleCellExperiment(list(counts=mat))

library(scran)
system.time(clust &lt;- quickCluster(sce))
##   user  system elapsed
##  3.170   0.174   3.411

This is running on my laptop - 16 GB RAM but I'm definitely not using all of it. I only go full throttle when I'm working on some real data, e.g., the 300k HCA bone marrow dataset. Check out the book for more details.
Session info below, I don't know quite enough SO-fu to know collapse it.
R version 4.0.0 Patched (2020-04-27 r78316)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin17.7.0 (64-bit)
Running under: macOS High Sierra 10.13.6

Matrix products: default
BLAS:   /Users/luna/Software/R/R-4-0-branch/lib/libRblas.dylib
LAPACK: /Users/luna/Software/R/R-4-0-branch/lib/libRlapack.dylib

locale:
[1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] parallel  stats4    stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets
[8] methods   base

other attached packages:
 [1] scran_1.16.0                scater_1.16.1
 [3] ggplot2_3.3.2               SingleCellExperiment_1.10.1
 [5] SummarizedExperiment_1.18.1 DelayedArray_0.14.0
 [7] matrixStats_0.56.0          Biobase_2.48.0
 [9] GenomicRanges_1.40.0        GenomeInfoDb_1.24.2
[11] IRanges_2.22.2              S4Vectors_0.26.1
[13] BiocGenerics_0.34.0

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] beeswarm_0.2.3            statmod_1.4.34
 [3] tidyselect_1.1.0          locfit_1.5-9.4
 [5] purrr_0.3.4               BiocSingular_1.4.0
 [7] lattice_0.20-41           colorspace_1.4-1
 [9] vctrs_0.3.1               generics_0.0.2
[11] viridisLite_0.3.0         rlang_0.4.6
[13] pillar_1.4.4              glue_1.4.1
[15] withr_2.2.0               BiocParallel_1.22.0
[17] dqrng_0.2.1               GenomeInfoDbData_1.2.3
[19] lifecycle_0.2.0           zlibbioc_1.34.0
[21] munsell_0.5.0             gtable_0.3.0
[23] rsvd_1.0.3                vipor_0.4.5
[25] irlba_2.3.3               BiocNeighbors_1.6.0
[27] Rcpp_1.0.4.6              edgeR_3.30.3
[29] scales_1.1.1              limma_3.44.3
[31] XVector_0.28.0            gridExtra_2.3
[33] dplyr_1.0.0               grid_4.0.0
[35] tools_4.0.0               bitops_1.0-6
[37] magrittr_1.5              RCurl_1.98-1.2
[39] tibble_3.0.1              crayon_1.3.4
[41] pkgconfig_2.0.3           ellipsis_0.3.1
[43] Matrix_1.2-18             DelayedMatrixStats_1.10.0
[45] ggbeeswarm_0.6.0          viridis_0.5.1
[47] R6_2.4.1                  igraph_1.2.5
[49] compiler_4.0.0