Julia: A fresh approach to parallel programming

Summary form only given. The Julia programming language is gaining enormous popularity. Julia was designed to be easy and fast. Most importantly, Julia shatters deeply established notions widely held in the applied community. Julia shows the fascinating dance between specialization and abstraction. Specialization allows for custom treatment. We can pick just the right algorithm for the right circumstance and this can happen at runtime based on argument types (code selection via multiple dispatch). Abstraction recognizes what remains the same after differences are stripped away and ignored as irrelevant. The recognition of abstraction allows for code reuse (generic programming). A simple idea that yields incredible power. Julia is many things to many people. In this talk we describe how Julia was built on the heels of our parallel computing experience with Star-P which began as an MIT research project and was a software product of Interactive Supercomputing. Our experience taught us that bolting parallelism onto an existing language that was not designed for performance or parallelism is difficult at best, and impossible at worst. One of our (not so secret) motivations to build Julia was to have the language we wanted for parallel numerical computing.