Book Image

Julia High Performance

By : Avik Sengupta
Book Image

Julia High Performance

By: Avik Sengupta

Overview of this book

Julia is a high performance, high-level dynamic language designed to address the requirements of high-level numerical and scientific computing. Julia brings solutions to the complexities faced by developers while developing elegant and high performing code. Julia High Performance will take you on a journey to understand the performance characteristics of your Julia programs, and enables you to utilize the promise of near C levels of performance in Julia. You will learn to analyze and measure the performance of Julia code, understand how to avoid bottlenecks, and design your program for the highest possible performance. In this book, you will also see how Julia uses type information to achieve its performance goals, and how to use multuple dispatch to help the compiler to emit high performance machine code. Numbers and their arrays are obviously the key structures in scientific computing – you will see how Julia’s design makes them fast. The last chapter will give you a taste of Julia’s distributed computing capabilities.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Timing Julia code


The first step to understanding anything is to measure it. The same goes for writing high-performance Julia code; we need to measure the performance of the code as the first step to achieving this. Fortunately Julia makes this extremely easy for us. There are simple ways to measure the time taken by any Julia code built into the Julia runtime. Moreover, if you want to perform statistically accurate benchmarking, there are high-quality packages available.

Tic and Toc

The simplest way to measure time in Julia is using the tic() and toc() functions. Place these functions respectively before and after any piece of Julia code, and we will note the time taken by this code on the console. Run the following code:

julia> tic(); sqrt(rand(1000)); toc();
elapsed time: 0.000137693 seconds

In the preceding code, we measured the time taken to generate 1,000 random numbers, and to compute its square root. Technically, all the toc() function does is print the elapsed time value since the...