SciPy Conference 2009: In Review

August 28, 2009

Cal Tech

Pasadena, CaliforniaThanks to Michael Avaizis of CACR

Total Attendance ~ 140– Tutorials ~ 90– Conference ~ 140– Sprints ~ 30-40

Keynote 1: Peter Norvig, Director of Research

Shirts…

Shirts…

Shirts…

How he came to Python

Search Comparisons

Keynote 2: Jonathon Guyer, Material Scientist

FiPy – Finite Volume PDE Solver

Simulation Images

Cahn-Hilliard Phase Field

NumPy/SciPy Talks

NumPy TutorialStefan Van Der Walt and David Cournapeau

Reading binary data

Programatic Approach

Declarative Way with NumPy

Generalized Ufuncs

Neighborhood Iterator (for C)

Stats Tutorial: Robert Kern

• Monty, meet Carlos.• Generate 10000 noisy datasets

from the same parameters.• Use curve_fit() on each dataset

and store the fitted parameters.• Look at the mean and

covariance of the parameters.

Visualization Talks

Matplotlib

• John Hunter• Darren Dale• Andrew Straw

• Ryan May• Michael Droettboom

Spines

Axes Toolkit3D Plots

Mayavi Prabhu Ramachandran and Gael Varoquaux

Chaco: Peter Wang

Cython

Dag Sverre Seljebotn

(Core cython maintainter)Kurt W. Smith: fwrap

Google Summer

of Code 2009

Cython for scientific computation

• Parallel execution within cython: – nogil context manager for conventional thread approach

– Message passing approach: mpi4py can be used within cython

• Ongoing work on fwrap (Kurt W. Smith): fortran support using cython as a “glue”

– Support more recent fortran dialects than f2py (F9x)

– Generated extension module is Py3k compatible, and does not need fwrap (only need to distribute C sources)

– Wrappers can be used within cython as well

HPC Talks

• PyCUDA (Nicolas Pinto)• CorePy (Andrew Friedley)• HPC Panel

(Nicolas Pinto, Michael Avaizis, Brian Granger)

• EC2 Tools (Nicolas Pinto)

Overheard

• Huge IPython Refactor for GUIs• Traits in IPython, Matplotlib, SymPy?• Draft Documentation for NumPy

docstrings nearly complete• More questions/comments on parallel

programming (but not a lot more answers)…

Eric’s Favorite Talk: Virtual Reality (for a fly…)

Andrew Straw Fly

Prabhu’s News

Overview

• $1 Billion to improve higher education in India• Open Source is a central focus• Python/NumPy/SciPy is funded project• Primary focus on Documentation and

Educational Material• $200,000 funding this year• SciPy India Conference in December

http://conference.scipy.org

Scientific Python Classes

Sept 21-25 Austin

Oct 19-22Silicon Valley

Nov 9-12 Chicago

Dec 7-11 Austin

Enthought Python Distribution (EPD)http://www.enthought.com/products/epd.php