<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

The Julia Languagehttp://julialang.org/

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/