SMS scnews item created by Emi Tanaka at Tue 5 Feb 2019 1329
Type: Meeting
Distribution: World
Expiry: 16 Feb 2019
Calendar1: 15 Feb 2019 1400-1500
CalLoc1: AGR Carslaw 829
CalTitle1: Sydney Coding Club Seminar Tutorial
Auth: etanaka@p8274.pc (assumed)
Sydney Coding Club
The Sydney Coding Club has been formed as a casual place to gather for coding and share interesting coding projects. Currently, the attendees are mostly statisticians using the statistical software R but we welcome people of any language and encourage diversity and inclusiveness. In particular, we ask people who come to provide welcoming and harassment-free behaviour (a code of conduct will be formally written in future with similar expectations as here).
You can find more details about the Sydney Coding Club here. We hope that this place becomes a place to exchange computational knowledge but also gives our alumnus to visit, further faciliating collegiality and inspiring ideas. For example, as part of the project, I shared the USYD Templates for R Markdown documents last week which can be extended for other languages such as python, C, etc for reproducible reports etc (latter not documented yet).
Next week 2-3pm Friday 15th February at AGR, we are pleased that Mark Greenaway has volunteered to give a talk on our occasional seminar tutorial! We will follow with the Sydney Coding Club gathering from 3-5pm.
Why is my code so slow?
Many of us have been frustrated by running a program to perform a numerical experiment or a calculation and having it take a long time. In this talk, I will give a brief history of computers as it relates to performance, touching on cache hierarchy, the end of Moore's Law, multicore/GPUs and distributed computing. I will explain the latencies within a modern computer system, and
the implications of this. I'll briefly provide a methodology for measuring and optimising the speed of programs. Finally, I'll provide a glimpse into the future of computing and why it's going to be better than the present/past.
This talk is supposed to be accessible to everyone, and as such, there will be no assumed knowledge.
About the speaker
Mark Greenaway did a PhD supervised by A/Prof John Ormerod in computational statistics. He enjoys High Performance Computing, programming in statically typed languages, drinking too much coffee and listening to heavy metal music. Preferably all at the same time.