Book Image

Getting Started with Julia

By : Ivo Balbaert
Book Image

Getting Started with Julia

By: Ivo Balbaert

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Getting Started with Julia
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
The Rationale for Julia
Index

Parallel operations and computing


In our multicore CPU and clustered computing world, it is imperative for a new language to have excellent parallel computing capabilities. This is one of the main strengths of Julia, providing an environment based on message passing between multiple processes that can execute on the same machine or on remote machines. In that sense, it implements the actor model (as Erlang, Elixir, and Dart do), but we'll see that the actual coding happens on a higher level than receiving and sending messages between processes, or workers (processors) as Julia calls them. The developer only needs to manage explicitly the main process from which all other workers are started. The message send and receive operations are simulated by higher-level operations that look like function calls.

Creating processes

Julia can be started as a REPL or as a separate application with a number of workers n available. The following command starts n processes on the local machine:

// code in Chapter...