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Julia Computing raises $24M Series A

hpcwire.com

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Re: Julia Computing raises $24M Series A

#6

Post by KenoFischer »

sidpatil wrote: post #4

The article mentions a circuit simulation package named JuliaSPICE, but I can't find any intonation on it. Can someone please provide a link?

There's not really much public about it yet. There'll be a technical talk about it at JuliaCon and we're talking to initial potential customers about it, but it's not quite ready for the wider community yet. If you want some of the technical details, I talked about it a bit in this earlier thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26425659 about the DARPA funding for our neural surrogates work in circuits (which will be part of the product offering, though the larger product is a modern simulator + analog design environment, which is supposed to address some of the pain of existing systems with the ML bits being a really nice bonus).

Re: Julia Computing raises $24M Series A

#7

Post by RandomWorker »

djhaskin987 wrote: post #2

Can someone please explain to me, a mere mortal, what is the big deal with Julia. Why use it, when there are so many other good languages out there with more community/support? Honest question.

Basically, the syntax is similar to matlap as well as lots of the same features around functional and variable deceleration as python. The best thing for sure is the native support for parallel processing. Where python is single tread.

Re: Julia Computing raises $24M Series A

#8

Post by Kranar »

djhaskin987 wrote: post #2

Can someone please explain to me, a mere mortal, what is the big deal with Julia. Why use it, when there are so many other good languages out there with more community/support? Honest question.

I think your question presupposes a lot of assumptions that may not be right. For one, I don't know that Julia is like a "big deal", certainly Python is the big deal in this field and I doubt Julia is looking to displace it wholesale. That said, Julia is a great addition to the scientific computing landscape because of its performance compared to other languages and its use of modern programming features. Python is just really really slow compared to Julia and parallelism in Python is a huge pain. Fortran is really really fast but that comes at a cost of being awkward to use and coming with a great deal of baggage. Julia is fast, feels modern, and has pretty easy parallelism.

Then there's Matlab, Mathematica, and they are also pretty good but they're closed source/proprietary, so their ecosystem is mostly limited and driven by commercial interests. Nothing wrong with that intrinsically and they're all widely used but it's one way Julia differentiates itself, by making the language open and making money through services.

Re: Julia Computing raises $24M Series A

#9

Post by nvrspyx »

djhaskin987 wrote: post #2

Can someone please explain to me, a mere mortal, what is the big deal with Julia. Why use it, when there are so many other good languages out there with more community/support? Honest question.

From what I understand, Julia is dynamically typed and similar to a scripting language like Python or Ruby, but is also compiled, so it has performance similar to C/C++ (it's also written in itself). It also has built-in support for parallelism, multi threading, GPU compute, and distributed compute. I'm sure others can provide more insight. I've only dabbled in it and haven't used it extensively in any sense of the word.
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