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

Numbers in Julia, their layout, and storage

The basic number types in Julia are designed to closely follow the hardware on which it runs. Integers and floats, therefore, have the same behavior as that which is defined in the CPU hardware, and operations on them run at hardware speeds. The decision to have default numeric types that are as close to the metal as possible is something that contributes to the C-like speed of Julia.

Integers

Integers in Julia are stored as system integers, which means that they are values that the CPU considers to be integers. The internal representation is what you would expect in C. Their default size, as in C, depends on the size of the CPU/OS on which Julia runs. On a 32-bit OS, the integers are 32...