Fernando's blog

TACC Software Days I recently had the chance to speak at the UT Austin Texas Advanced Computing Center , during their Fifth Annual Scientific Software Day thanks to a kind invitation by Sergey Fomel and Victor Eijkhout .  Since the audience wasn't specifically composed of Python users, I gave a general introduction to Python's role in scientific computing, but then spent most of my time presenting some of the recent work we've been doing on IPython, extending the model of basic interactive computing in what I think are interesting directions with multiple client models and new parallel computing interfaces. Sergey had asked me to provide a somewhat personal account, so the presentation is fairly biased towards my own path (and therefore IPython) through the scipy effort.  Since the foucs of TACC is high-performance computing, I hope some of our new functionality on the IPython front will be useful to such users. There were some very interesting presentations about t...

In what's becoming a bit of a tradition , Simula's Hans-Petter Langtangen , U. Washington's Randy LeVeque and I co-organized yet another minisymposium on Python for Scientific computing at a SIAM conference. At the Computational Science and Engineering 2011 meeting , held in Reno February 28-March 4, we had 2 sessions with 4 talks each ( part I and II ).  I have put together a page with all the slides I got from the various speakers, that also includes slides from python-related talks in other minisymposia.  I have also posted some pictures from our sessions and from the minisymposium on reproducible research that my friend and colleague Jarrod Millman organized during the same conference. We had great attendance, with a standing-room-only crowd for the first session, something rather unusual during the parallel sessions of a SIAM conference.  But more importantly, this year there were three other sessions entirely devoted to Python in scientific computing ...

Last week I was in Seattle, attending part of of the Sage Days 29 workshop, which had a strong focus on the more numerical/applied topics and the 'scipy ecosystem', as it's funded by William Stein's Sage: Unifying Mathematical Software for Scientists, Engineers, and Mathematicians grant. I gave a talk that covered topics that are fairly familiar to many in the scipy community, about using Python for numerical work, but was intended to address many from the Sage group who come from a pure mathematics/number theory background.  I have posted the PDF of my slides ; William recorded the talk and posted it online, as well as posting some pictures from the last day (the anecdote about how I unplugged Colombia from the internet when I was a physics undergrad is from 0:11:20 to 0:14:12): For me, the bulk of the workshop's focus was to make progress on IPython.  Thomas Kluyver , a new core IPython developer, was able to take a week off from his studies and attend...

Update: added links to other related posts, significantly expanded the section on Git and Github for scientific work. Link summary: Page with abstracts and slide links , Victoria Stodden's blog , Mark Liberman's blog ,  my slides and extended abstract , audio (my talk is at time 53:25 to 1:10:47). At this year's AAAS meeting, currently taking place in DC (in unseasonably warm and sunny weather), Victoria Stodden from the statistics department at Columbia, organized a symposium titled The Digitization of Science: Reproducibility and Interdisciplinary Knowledge Transfer that was very well attended. Lessons from the Open Source software world I have tagged this post with "Python" because my take on the matter was to contrast the world of classic research/academic publishing with the practices of open source software development, and what little I know about that (as well as some specific tools I mentioned, like Sphinx ), I picked up from the w...