The Julia programming language has brought an innovative new approach to scientific computing, promising a combination of performance and productivity that is not usually available in the current set of languages that is commonly used. In solving the two- language problem, it has seen tremendous growth both in academia and industry. It has been used in domains from robotics, astronomy, and physics, to insurance and trading. It has particular relevance in the area of machine learning, with increasing use for the emerging field of differentiable computing.
Most new developers are attracted to the language due to its promise of high performance. This book shows you how and why that is possible. We talk about the design choices of the language's creators that allow such a high-performance compiler to be built. We also show you the steps that you, as an application developer, can take to ensure the highest possible performance for your code. We also tell you the ways in which your code can work with the compiler and runtime to fully utilize your hardware to the greatest extent possible.
This book is for the beginner and intermediate Julia developer who wants to fully leverage Julia's promise of performance with productivity. We assume you are proficient with one or more programming languages and have some familiarity with Julia's syntax. We do not expect you to be expert Julia programmers yet but assume that you have written small Julia programs, or that you have taken an introductory course on the language.
Julia is a high- performance language, with the possibility to run programs that are competitive in performance with code written in C. This chapter explains why Julia code is fast. It also provides context and sets the stage for the rest of the book
Shows you how to measure the speed of Julia programs and understand where the bottlenecks are. It also shows you how to measure the memory usage of Julia programs and the amount of time spent on garbage collection
One of the principal ways in which Julia achieves its performance goals is by using type information. This chapter describes how the Julia compiler uses type information to create fast machine code. It describes ways of writing Julia code to provide effective type information to the Julia compiler.
Functions are the primary artifacts for code organization in Julia, with multiple dispatch being the single most important design feature in the language. This chapter shows you how to use these facilities for fast code.
Describes some internals of Julia's number types in relation to performance, and helps you understand the design decisions that were made to achieve that performance.
Arrays are one of the most important data structures in scientific programming. This chapter shows you how to get the best performance out of your arrays—how to store them, and how to operate on them
In recent years, the general- purpose GPU has turned out to be one of the best ways of running fast parallel computations. Julia provides a unique method for compiling high-level code to the GPU. This chapter shows you how to use the GPU with Julia.
Most programs in Julia run on a single thread, on a single processor core. However, certain concurrent primitives make it possible to run parallel, or seemingly parallel, operations, without the full complexities of shared memory multi-threading. In this chapter, we discuss how the concepts of tasks and asynchronous IO help create responsive programs.
In this chapter, we discuss the details of Julia's experimantal support for shared memory multi-threading, and see how this is different from other languages. We see how to speed up our computations using threads, and learn some of the limitations that currently exist in this model.
Recognizes that there comes a time in every large computation's life when living on a single machine is not enough. There is either too much data to fit in the memory of a single machine, or computations need to be finished quicker than can be achieved on all the cores of a single processor. At that stage, computation moves from a single machine to many. Julia comes with advanced distributed computation facilities built in, which we describe in this chapter.
With Julia High Performance, you'll pick up the key essentials of Julia in no time. You can then join the friendly, fast growing, online community of Julia programmers. Welcome to the world of Julia! Read this book and you will soon join us in loving the Julia language.