Post on 20-Feb-2016
description
<Zurich Julia Users
GroupMeetup 1 @Stamford Consultants – Meeting Room 2nd Floor
22nd May 2014
Agenda• Welcome and Introduction (20’)• Who are you?• How are you using Julia? • What do you expect from this group?
• Organisation of the group (15’)• Where does Julia come from? (5’)• Short Intro to Julia (30’)• Select the location, dates and topics for the next meetings (15’)
Welcome and Introduction• Dominik Holenstein• CRM & Reporting Business Analyst @ 3M • VBA (Excel), C#, NLP++ (new), Julia (new), MATLAB (very new), (R)• Reading, programming, Mathematical finance, Natural Language
Processing• Why Julia?
• A new progrmaming language, couriosity• «MATLAB-like» syntax / MATLAB is too expensive
• NEW with MATLAB 2014a: Personal Edition available for SFr. 160.-
• Faster than R • Background of the Julia inventors (research, technical computing)
What do you expect from this group?• Best practice• Tips & tricks• What works, what not?• Interesting projects• New project ideas• Fresh minds and ideas
Organization of the Group• Meetup frequency: Bi-weekly, monthly …• Day of the week: Fix or flexible?• Place• Stamford Consultants• Irchel Campus of the University
• Organizers• Dominik• Who else?
• Communication in English
Let’s start with Julia
Julia Binaries and IDEs• Download and install the binaries
• http://julialang.org/downloads/• Current stable version (May 2014): v0.2.1
• Choose an IDE (both are available for Linux/OSX/WIN)
• JuliaStudio by forio (the one I am using)
• http://forio.com/products/julia-studio/download/• Based on Qt
• LightTable• http://www.lighttable.com/• Based on the Clojure (JVM)• A very interesting approach, it’s worth to give it a try
Julia DocsThe Julia Manual: http://docs.julialang.org/en/release-0.2/manual/
The Julia Standard Library:http://docs.julialang.org/en/release-0.2/stdlib/
Available Packages:http://docs.julialang.org/en/release-0.2/packages/packagelist/
Julia CommunityGoogle Groups• julia-users• julia-dev• julia-stats• julia-opt
Very friendly and no question is too basic .
We use GitHub to track our source code and for trackingand discussing issues and commits. There is also a list of packages for Julia, many of which are also hosted on and developed using GitHub.
Where does Julia come from?
The Creators of Julia
Jeff BezansonStefan Karpinski
Viral ShahAlan Edelman
MIT students and researchers
«Why we created Julia»
Interactive
Compiled
Keep hackers happyEasy to learn
Easy to install
Linux / OSX / WIN
Gluing programs together like in a shell
Linear Algebra like in MATLAB
String processing like Perl
Statistics like R
Mathematical notation like MATLAB
Macros like Lisp
Dynamism like Ruby
Speed of COpen Source
Liberal licence (MIT)
Some noteworthy features
Julia Benchmark (Table)C performance = 1.0, smaller is better
Julia Benchmark (Chart)
Fast Numeric Computation• Devectorize espressions – the opposite to MATLAB• Merge computations into a single loop• Write cache-friendly code• Avoid creating arrays in loops• Use BLAS
JuliaCon – June 26 and27 in Chicagohttp://juliacon.org/
The first-ever Julia conference will take place June 26 and 27 (Thursday and Friday) at the University of Chicago Gleacher Center in Chicago, Illinois. Expect two days of cutting-edge technical talks, a chance to rub shoulders with Julia's creators, and a weekend in a city known for its beautiful lakefront and world-class architecture.
Google Summer of Code 2014Julia has been accepted as a Google Summer of Code mentoring
organization. The following are ideas for student summer projects.
Standardized dataset packagingNative Julia solvers for
ordinary differential equations
Native Julia implementations of iterative solvers for numerical
linear algebraFixed-size arrays
with SIMD support
Matrix functions
Native Julia implementations of massively parallel dense
linear algebra routines
Julia wrappers for high performance GPU
programming
Light Table integration
Julia Jump Start
Topics • Vectors, Matrices, Arrays• Simple Calculations• Functions• Devectorization• Types
http://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/julia/