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

Thread safety and synchronization primitives

Threads imply code running simultaneously on multiple processor cores in a computer. The processors and the code running within them have access to the entire memory of the computer. This means that code in two threads can attempt to change the same piece of data in memory at the same time. As you can imagine, that would not be a good idea, and many different strategies have been created over the years to deal with this situation in multithreaded code.

Multithreaded Monte Carlo simulation

Remember the code we saw in Chapter 7, Accelerating Code with the GPU, to calculate the value of pi using Monte Carlo simulation. It used a loop to calculate a position based on draws from a random number...