[Crib-list] SPEAKER: Fernando Perez (UC Berkeley) - Friday, March 1, 2013 -- TIME: 4:00 PM in Room 46-3310

[Shirley Entzminger]

TITLE:		IPython: Tools for the Entire Lifecycle of Research Computing
SPEAKER: 	Fernando Perez, PhD, University of California, Berkeley
DATE: 		Friday, March 1 2013
TIE: 		4:00PM to 5:00PM
LOCATION: 	Rm. 46-3310
HOST: 		Satrajit Ghosh, MIT
CONTACT: 	Satrajit Ghosh, satra at mit.edu
Relevant URL:

IPython started as a better interactive Python interpreter in 2001, but 
over the last decade it has grown into a rich and powerful set of 
interlocking tools aimed at enabling an efficient, fluid and productive 
workflow in the typical use cases encountered by scientists in everyday 
research.

Today, IPython consists of a kernel executing user code and capable of 
communicating with a variety of clients, using ZeroMQ for networking via a 
well-documented protocol. This enables IPython to support, from a single 
codebase, a rich variety of usage scenarios through user-facing 
applications and an API for embedding:

* An interactive, terminal-based shell with many capabilities far beyond 
the default Python interactive interpreter (this is the default 
application opened by the ``ipython`` command that most users are familiar 
with).

* A Qt console that provides the look and feel of a terminal, but adds 
support for inline figures, graphical calltips, a persistent sessionthat 
can survive crashes of the kernel process, and more.

* A web-based notebook that can execute code and also contain rich text 
and figures, mathematical equations and arbitrary HTML. This notebook 
presents a document-like view with cells where code is executed but that 
can be edited in-place, reordered, mixed with explanatory text and 
figures, etc.

* A high-performance, low-latency system for parallel computing that 
supports the control of a cluster of IPython engines communicating over 
ZeroMQ, with optimizations that minimize unnecessary copying of large 
objects (especially numpy arrays).

In this talk we will show how IPython supports all stages in the lifecycle 
of a scientific idea: individual exploration, collaborative development, 
large-scale production using parallel resources, publication and 
education. In particular, the IPython Notebook supports multiuser 
collaboration and allows scientists to share their work in an open 
document format that is a true "executable paper": notebooks can be 
version controlled, exported to HTML or PDF for publication, and used for 
teaching. We will demonstrate the key features of the system, including 
recent examples of scientific publications made with the notebook.

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For more information, please visit...

http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=3612