Book Image

Julia 1.0 High Performance - Second Edition

By : Avik Sengupta
Book Image

Julia 1.0 High Performance - Second Edition

By: Avik Sengupta

Overview of this book

Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for numerical computing. If you want to understand how to avoid bottlenecks and design your programs for the highest possible performance, then this book is for you. The book starts with how Julia uses type information to achieve its performance goals, and how to use multiple dispatches to help the compiler emit high-performance machine code. After that, you will learn how to analyze Julia programs and identify issues with time and memory consumption. We teach you how to use Julia's typing facilities accurately to write high-performance code and describe how the Julia compiler uses type information to create fast machine code. Moving ahead, you'll master design constraints and learn how to use the power of the GPU in your Julia code and compile Julia code directly to the GPU. Then, you'll learn how tasks and asynchronous IO help you create responsive programs and how to use shared memory multithreading in Julia. Toward the end, you will get a flavor of Julia's distributed computing capabilities and how to run Julia programs on a large distributed cluster. By the end of this book, you will have the ability to build large-scale, high-performance Julia applications, design systems with a focus on speed, and improve the performance of existing programs.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword
Licences

Timing Julia functions

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 that. As a high-performance language, Julia includes many tools to do this easily, effectively, and accurately. Many of these are built into the language and the standard library, while others are in external packages that can be installed with a single command. All of these tools not only make it easy to measure the performance of the code; they also make it easy to execute the measurement correctly. 

When reading this book, whether in print or on screen, we encourage you to run the code and see the results for yourself. The concepts in this book will become much easier to learn if you run the code yourself. The simplest would be to copy/paste the code you see...