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Julia language for scientific computing

Why Julia?

Julia is an option for scientific computing that requires high throughput. Julia is a JIT compiled language which offers the benefits of an interpreted language (interactive REPL, Jupyter notebooks) with the speed of a compiled language which leverages LLVM (bytecode compiled with the same VM used by Clang for C/C++). This does mean that compile time becomes a factor, which can effect startup time the first time you use a function. See below for instructions on setting up Julia to precompile the system image in order to remove the startup penalty on things you use often.

This also means that global variables produce a comparatively significant performance hit on Julia because Julia compiles multiple versions of each function (methods), each of which corresponds to a different type signature both for arguments and any variables used. Since global variables may change type at any time, this means that the Just-in-Time (JIT) must compile a new version of the function if the global changes type. You can get around this by declaring global variables const (which interestingly only consts their type although other weird things can happen if you do change the value anyways) or by using closures (essentially variable currying) so that the type is known beforehand.

For a much more thorough take from UC Irvince Data Science Initiative with a deeper technical discussion of the design decisions that made Julia attractive, see https://ucidatascienceinitiative.github.io/IntroToJulia/Html/WhyJulia.

Install

  1. Follow instructions to install Anaconda Python since a few Julia packages rely on python functionality
  2. Install Julia from julialang.org
  3. Highly Recommended Precompile System Image using instructions below

Add Julia to PATH

  • Note that this isn't strictly necessary and possibly even advised against on Windows
  • For Windows 10, a possibly better option than actually adding Julia to path is to alias julia to C:\Users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Local\<JULIAFOLDER>\bin\julia.exe (see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20530996/aliases-in-windows-command-prompt for details on using DOSKEY to create aliases and also how to make them persistent using .bat files run via the AutoRun registry key)
  • For Windows 10, "Edit Environment Variables" either by
  • For Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) add julia.exe to your path
    • i.e. in ~/.bashrc add PATH=/mnt/c/Users/<USERNAME>/AppData/Local/<JULIAFOLDER>/bin

Precompile System Image with useful things for ODE solvers and plotting

  1. Download buildimg.jl, userimg.jl and setupjl.jl into a folder
  2. shell> julia setupjl.jl will setup the folder as an environment and install Plots, GR (a Plots backend), DifferentialEquations and the development version of PackageCompiler. See below for more details if you are interested.
    • This could take a few minutes.
  3. shell> julia buildimg.jl to build a new system image.
    • This will take even longer
    • Copy the results sys.dll somewhere convenient so you can run julia -J /path/to/sys.dll and get your new shiny, fast system image.
  4. If there is something you want to add to the system image, just modify userimg.jl to include statements of the using package variety and also run any of the functions that take a long time normally after using package. So for example the default userimg.jl has using Plots; gr(); plot(1:5,1:5) so that the full plot routines get cached. It would also be good to update the Project.toml file that is generated by setupjl.jl. This can be done directly or by modifying setupjl.jl and re-running it.
  5. You will also have to rebuild the system image if you update any of the packages which are in the image - i.e. Plots or DifferentialEquations

Install Packages (using environments)

  • See https://julialang.github.io/Pkg.jl/v1/ and https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/stdlib/Pkg/index.html for more information on package management in Julia
  • I suggest using project-specific environments
    • create a folder that will contain the project projfolder
    • start Julia from projfolder or else start Julia and cd("<projfolder>") i.e. cd("C:\Users\<USERNAME>\Documents\jl_project")
  • From Julia command prompt, type ] to start package manager
    • activate . to activate the environment (could also activate <projfolder> with the correct path)
    • add <pkgspec> to install package
    • precompile to precompile the packages for better load times Highly Recommended
    • rm <pkgspec> to remove package and then gc to remove dependencies
    • <Backspace> to exit pkg prompt

Recommended Packages (mostly installed if you followed the setup instructions and used setupjl.jl)

Possible packages of interest

  • ODEInterfaceDiffEq
    • provides radau() ODE solver method for high-accuracy (low-tolerance) ODE solving
    • require gfortran
  • CuArrays -- for GPU acceleration in DifferentialEquations
  • ProgressMeter for nice progress meters on the REPL, also maybe look at the Juno editor progressbars
  • CSV for reading and writing .csv files
    • Also depends on DataFrames and other friends that may be useful especially if you are from an R background