Chris Rackauckas

Dr. Rackauckas is a Research Affiliate and Co-PI of the Julia Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, VP of Modeling and Simulation at JuliaHub and Creator / Lead Developer of JuliaSim. He's also the Director of Scientific Research at Pumas-AI and Creator / Lead Developer of Pumas, and Lead Developer of the SciML Open Source Software Organization.

Dr. Rackauckas's research and software is focused on Scientific Machine Learning (SciML): the integration of domain models with artificial intelligence techniques like machine learning. By utilizing the structured scientific (differential equation) models together with the unstructured data-driven models of machine learning, our simulators can be accelerated, our science can better approximate the true systems, all while enjoying the robustness and explainability of mechanistic dynamical models.

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Sessions

11-30
10:55
30min
Building Fast Packages Faster: Julia as a Backend to Python and R
Chris Rackauckas

Whether through Cython, Rcpp, or other interfaces, many of the common packages in the Python and R ecosystems contain large amounts of C code for the package internals. The reason for this is performance: C is just a faster language than Python and R. However, Julia is also as fast as C while having higher level semantics similar to Python and R. Could one build Python and R packages using Julia? In this talk we will discuss how diffeqpy/diffeqr were built as packages to allow Python/R users to use Julia's DifferentialEquations.jl in a simple way. We will discuss topics from automating GPU compatibility, packaging precompiled binaries of Julia code, and automating interface wrappers which enable doing this efficiently. The audience will leave with a clear idea of how to use Julia as an alternative to C for package internals.

Ernst-Curie