Book Image

IPython Interactive Computing and Visualization Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Cyrille Rossant
Book Image

IPython Interactive Computing and Visualization Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Cyrille Rossant

Overview of this book

Python is one of the leading open source platforms for data science and numerical computing. IPython and the associated Jupyter Notebook offer efficient interfaces to Python for data analysis and interactive visualization, and they constitute an ideal gateway to the platform. IPython Interactive Computing and Visualization Cookbook, Second Edition contains many ready-to-use, focused recipes for high-performance scientific computing and data analysis, from the latest IPython/Jupyter features to the most advanced tricks, to help you write better and faster code. You will apply these state-of-the-art methods to various real-world examples, illustrating topics in applied mathematics, scientific modeling, and machine learning. The first part of the book covers programming techniques: code quality and reproducibility, code optimization, high-performance computing through just-in-time compilation, parallel computing, and graphics card programming. The second part tackles data science, statistics, machine learning, signal and image processing, dynamical systems, and pure and applied mathematics.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
IPython Interactive Computing and Visualization CookbookSecond Edition
Contributors
Preface
Index

Introduction


The previous chapter presented techniques for code optimization. Sometimes, these methods are not sufficient, and we need to resort to advanced high-performance computing techniques.

In this chapter, we will see three broad, but not mutually exclusive, categories of methods:

  • Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation of Python code

  • Resorting to a lower-level language, such as C, from Python

  • Dispatching tasks across multiple computing units using parallel computing

With JIT compilation, Python code is dynamically compiled into a lower-level language. Compilation occurs at runtime rather than ahead of execution. The translated code runs faster since it is compiled rather than interpreted. JIT compilation is a popular technique as it can lead to fast and high-level languages, whereas these two characteristics used to be mutually exclusive in general.

JIT compilation techniques are implemented in packages such as Numba or NumExpr, which we will cover in this chapter.

We will also use Julia, a programming...