High Performance Computing with Python

Please be aware that this webinar was developed for our legacy systems. As a consequence, some parts of the webinar or its entirety may not be applicable to the national systems (Graham, Cedar, Beluga etc.).

Python has numerous advantages over traditional compiled languages like C and Fortran, and it is seeing increasing adoption among the scientific community. However, despite its advantages, there are challenges associated with using Python in a High Performance Computing (HPC) environment. First, a “vanilla” Python program is generally slower than an analogous compiled language program. Also, Python is relatively new to the HPC field, and many scientific programmers may not be aware of its parallel computing capabilities. This talk will discuss various strategies to make a serial Python code faster, for example using libraries like NumPy, or tools like Cython which compile Python code. The talk will also discuss the available tools for running Python in parallel, focusing on the mpi4py module which implements MPI (Message Passing Interface) in Python.

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This webinar was presented by Pawel Pomorski (SHARCNET) on April 29th, 2015 as a part of a series of regular biweekly webinars ran by SHARCNET. The webinars cover different high performance computing (HPC) topics, are approximately 45 minutes in length, and are delivered by experts in the relevant fields. Further details can be found on this web page: https://www.sharcnet.ca/help/index.ph...

SHARCNET is a consortium of 18 Canadian academic institutions who share a network of high performance computers (http://www.sharcnet.ca). SHARCNET is a part of Compute Ontario (http://computeontario.ca/) and Compute Canada (https://computecanada.ca).