Author Archives: Julia Computing, Inc.

Wilmott – Why Julia Matters for Computational Finance

In the November 2016 issue of Wilmott
Magazine
, Julia Computing’s Viral
Shah and Simon Byrne explain why Julia is taking the field of
quantitative finance by storm.

Why are so many quants from investment banking,
insurance,
asset
management
,
fund
management
,
foreign exchange
analytics
,
commodity trading, energy trading, central
banking
and risk
analysis switching to Julia?

Finance quants find Julia the optimal finance solution for a number of
reasons:

  • Julia is the fastest modern language for financial, mathematical,
    statistical and scientific computing

  • Julia delivers lightning fast speed – speed improvements up to 11x
    for macroeconomic
    modeling
    , 225x
    for parallel
    supercomputing

    and 1,000x for insurance risk model
    estimation

  • Julia is the only modern financial, mathematical, statistical or
    scientific language that can handle massive datasets updated in real
    time, such as financial tick data

  • Julia runs on your desktop, laptop, enterprise server, private or
    public cloud

  • Julia is optimized for supercomputers with
    accelerators
    and
    parallel
    computing

  • JuliaFin is fully integrated with Excel and Bloomberg

  • JuliaFin includes Miletus, a custom finance package to design and
    execute real-time trading strategies

  • Julia is easy to learn with flexible syntax that is familiar to
    users of Python, R and Matlab

  • Julia integrates well with existing code and platforms

  • Julia code is elegant – advanced libraries make coding simple and
    reduce the number of lines of code – in some cases, by 90% or more –
    resulting in a solution that is faster, easier to code, analyze and
    debug

  • Julia solves the two language problem – because Julia combines the
    ease of use and familiar syntax of Python, R, Matlab, or Stata with
    the speed of C, C++ or Java, programmers no longer need to estimate
    models in one language and reproduce them in a faster
    production language. With Julia, these steps can be performed in a
    single high-level, high-capacity, high-speed environment.

No wonder users such as
BlackRock, the
Federal Reserve Bank of New
York
, Nobel
Laureate Thomas J.
Sargent
,
and the world’s largest investment banks,
insurers,
risk managers, fund
managers
, asset
managers, foreign exchange
analysts
, energy
traders, commodity traders and others are switching to Julia.

Julia Used to Win Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) Hackathon

Graz, Austria – Julia Computing is pleased to congratulate Tangent
Works on winning the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) hackathon
using Julia. The IIoT hackathon was centered on big data and machine
learning analysis and was organized by Andritz and Pioneers Discover in
Graz, Austria from Jan 23-25, 2017.

Tangent Works competed with several European startups to win first
place. Competitors were required to solve 5 different tasks related to
IIoT, largely focused on optimization and predictive maintenance.

According to Milan Garbiar, Managing Director at Tangent Works, “We
relied heavily on Julia during the hackathon. We were the only
competitor using Julia. This, and the fact that we were able to use our
product, which is written in Julia, gave us a considerable advantage
compared with our competitors who relied largely on Python and R.”

Viral Shah, Julia Computing CEO said, “This is another great example of
the power of Julia. Because of Julia’s intuitive syntax, faster speed,
simpler coding and greater capacity for big data, Julia is the best
choice for optimization when speed and simplicity matter most.”

About Julia Computing and Julia

Julia Computing (JuliaComputing.com) was
founded in 2015 by the co-creators of the Julia language to provide
support to businesses and researchers who use Julia.

Julia is the fastest modern high performance open source computing
language for data and analytics. It combines the functionality and ease
of use of Python, R, Matlab, SAS and Stata with the speed of Java and
C++. Julia delivers dramatic improvements in simplicity, speed, capacity
and productivity.

  1. Julia is lightning fast. Julia provides speed improvements up to
    1,000x for insurance model estimation, 225x for parallel
    supercomputing image analysis and 11x for macroeconomic modeling.

  2. Julia is easy to learn. Julia’s flexible syntax is familiar and
    comfortable for users of Python, R and Matlab.

  3. Julia integrates well with existing code and platforms. Users of
    Python, R, Matlab and other languages can easily integrate their
    existing code into Julia.

  4. Elegant code. Julia was built from the ground up for
    mathematical, scientific and statistical computing, and has advanced
    libraries that make coding simple and fast, and dramatically reduce
    the number of lines of code required – in some cases, by 90%
    or more.

  5. Julia solves the two language problem. Because Julia combines
    the ease of use and familiar syntax of Python, R and Matlab with the
    speed of C, C++ or Java, programmers no longer need to estimate
    models in one language and reproduce them in a faster
    production language. This saves time and reduces error and cost.

Employers looking to hire Julia programmers in 2017 include: Google,
Apple, Amazon, Facebook, IBM, BlackRock, Capital One,
PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ford, Oracle, Comcast, Massachusetts General
Hospital, NaviHealth, Harvard University, Columbia University, Farmers
Insurance, Pilot Flying J, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oak Ridge
National Laboratory and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

Julia users and partners include: Amazon, IBM, Intel, Microsoft,
DARPA, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, National Energy Research
Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), Federal Aviation Administration
(FAA), MIT Lincoln Labs, Moore Foundation, Nobel Laureate Thomas J.
Sargent, Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY), Capital One,
Brazilian National Development Bank (BNDES), BlackRock, Conning, Berkery
Noyes, BestX, Path BioAnalytics, Invenia, AOT Energy, AlgoCircle,
Trinity Health, Gambit, Augmedics, Tangent Works, Voxel8, UC Berkeley
Autonomous Race Car (BARC) and many of the world’s largest investment
banks, asset managers, fund managers, foreign exchange analysts,
insurers, hedge funds and regulators.

Universities and institutes using Julia include: MIT, Caltech,
Stanford, UC Berkeley, Harvard, Columbia, NYU, Oxford, NUS, UCL, Nantes,
Alan Turing Institute, University of Chicago, Cornell, Max Planck
Institute, Australian National University, University of Warwick,
University of Colorado, Queen Mary University of London, London
Institute of Cancer Research, UC Irvine, University of Kaiserslautern.

Julia is being used to: analyze images of the universe and research
dark matter, drive parallel computing on supercomputers, diagnose
medical conditions, provide surgeons with real-time imagery using
augmented reality, analyze cancer genomes, manage 3D printers, pilot
self-driving racecars, build drones, improve air safety, manage the
electric grid, provide analytics for foreign exchange trading, energy
trading, insurance, regulatory compliance, macroeconomic modeling,
sports analytics, manufacturing and much, much more.

Newsletter 2017

We wanted to thank all Julia users and well wishers for the support and for being part of the Julia Community, and to give an update on some exciting developments for 2017:

  1. JuliaPro Release
  2. Julia by the Numbers
  3. Julia Jobs Growth
  4. Julia Development Update Calendar
  5. Julia in the News
  6. Julia Case Studies
  7. Contact Julia Computing


  1. JuliaPro Release

    If you haven’t already downloaded the new JuliaPro, please take
    a moment to do so now.

    JuliaPro comes in two flavors:

    • JuliaPro: The fast, free way to download and use Julia
      immediately on your desktop or laptop. Includes Julia compiler,
      debugger, profiler, integrated development environment,
      visualization and plotting and over 100 curated packages.

    • JuliaPro Enterprise: For installation on your desktop, laptop or
      enterprise server. Includes all the features of JuliaPro, plus Excel
      integration and support for $1,500 per user per year. Indemnity is
      available with a customer site license for an additional charge.

  2. Julia by the Numbers

    Julia use expanded dramatically in 2016, and 2017 is shaping up to be
    the year that Julia expands from early adopters into the mainstream.

Cumulative Number of Source As of Jan 1, 2016 As of Jan 1, 2017 Annual growth
Stack Overflow questions Stack Overflow, script 1,420 2,540 +79%
Registered packages pkg.julialang.org 690 1,190 +72%
GitHub stars across packages pkg.julialang.org 12,582 21,843 +74%
JuliaBox users juliabox.com 34k 58k +71%
Julia downloads S3stat, using S3 logs 346k 904k +161%
Published citations for Julia Paper ([1] & [2]) Google Scholar 143 316 +121%

[1] Julia: A Fast Dynamic Language for Technical Computing (2012)
[2] Julia: A Fresh Approach to Numerical Computing (2014)

  1. Julia Jobs Growth

    Demand for Julia programmers is increasing rapidly in finance,
    industry, science and technology.

    Employers looking to hire Julia programmers in 2017 include: Apple,
    Amazon, Facebook, BlackRock, Ford, Oracle, Comcast, Massachusetts
    General Hospital, Farmers Insurance, Los Alamos National Laboratory and
    the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

    Indeed.com: Julia Job Postings and Julia Jobseeker Interest


  2. Julia Development Update Calendar

    2016

    • Julia 0.5, JuliaPro and JuliaPro Enterprise released, including
      Excel integration

    • Julia debugger, profiler and integrated development environment
      released

    • Julia became available on Amazon Web Services and AWS pronounced
      MXNet the “Framework of Choice” for deep learning using Julia and
      other languages

    2017 – Q1

    • JuliaFin launches, including Bloomberg integration, Excel
      integration, advanced time-series functionality and Miletus, a new
      dedicated Julia package for implementation of complex trading
      strategies

    • Julia launches on Microsoft Azure’s Data Science Virtual Machine

    2017 – Q2 & Q3

    • JuliaCon 2017 @ UC Berkeley

    • Julia 1.0 release

  3. Julia in the News

    • “Julia is poised to become one of the leading tools deployed by
      developers and programmers at banks, hedge funds, regulators and
      vendors.”
      WatersTechnology:
      “The Infancy of Julia: An Inside Look at How Traders and Economists
      are Using the Julia Programming Language”

    • “Julia is fast, … can call C directly without a wrapper, integrates
      top tier open source C and Fortran code into its Base library, and
      can easily call Python as well. Julia is built for parallel and
      cloud computing, and has particular interest from the analytics and
      scientific computing communities. According to KDnuggets’ most
      recent analytics software poll, Julia placed 8th on the list of most
      used programming languages.”
      KDnuggets:
      “Top Machine Learning Projects for Julia”

    • “Delivering Hadoop style parallelism, … [Julia] is destined to
      make a major impact.” Coding
      Dojo
      :
      “7 New Programming Languages to Learn in 2016”

    • “[I]t’s notable that Julia, a high-level programming language
      built expressly for use in technical computing, has entered TIOBE’s
      list …. In industries that prize efficiency, such as finance, Julia
      has enjoyed rapid adoption by tech professionals and
      data scientists. In banking and trading, algorithmic traders and
      quants now rely on Julia because it allows them to push code as
      quickly as possible to market, without needing to rewrite.”
      Dice:
      “Julia Gains Popularity on the TIOBE Language List”

    • “Overall, Julia is a welcome addition [to the High Performance
      Computing (HPC)] community. …The future looks bright for Julia. New
      and existing HPC coders will appreciate a dirt-simple on-ramp to the
      HPC superhighway.”
      TheNextPlatform:
      “Dirt Simple HPC: Making the Case for Julia”

    • Julia should be on the radar of everyone from traders and operations
      executives to IT managers, developers and data scientists and really
      anyone who wants to expand their job options as electronic trading
      takes over and the industry as a while becomes more
      technology-centric.”
      Efinancialcareers:
      “Julia Programming Language: This Is the New Skill Hedge Funds Are
      Asking For”

  4. Julia Case Studies

    • Nobel Laureate Thomas J.
      Sargent
      ,
      presenting at JuliaCon 2016, described his next-generation
      macroeconomic models as “a walking advertisement for Julia”

    • Julia for Deep
      Learning

      was showcased with IBM at SC16, using IBM’s Power8 server and NVIDIA
      GPU accelerators to increase the processing speed of medical image
      analysis 57x for diagnosing diabetic retinopathy

    • Researchers at
      Intel,
      UC
      Berkeley
      ,
      Lawrence Berkeley
      Labs
      , the
      National Energy Research Scientific Computing
      Center (NERSC)
      ,
      JuliaLabs@MIT
      and Julia Computing developed a new
      parallel supercomputing method which increases the speed of
      astronomical image analysis 225x

    • BlackRock,
      the world’s largest asset manager, is using Julia to upgrade their
      trademark Aladdin analytics platform

    • Lincoln
      Labs
      and
      the Federal Aviation
      Administration

      are using Julia to analyze 650 billion decision points for the next
      generation Aircraft Collision Avoidance System

    • The Federal Reserve Bank of New
      York
      is using
      Julia to run their Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model
      10-11x faster with 50% fewer lines of code

    • Voxel8 is
      using Julia for 3D printing and drone manufacture

    • UC Berkeley researchers are using Julia to guide the Berkeley
      Autonomous Race
      Car

    • An article published in
      Nature
      describes how UK cancer researchers are using Julia to model cancer
      evolution and inform interpretation of cancer genomes

    • Augmedics
      is using Julia to provide surgeons with ‘X-ray vision’ using Julia
      and augmented reality to project images of internal structures onto
      patients’ bodies in real time during surgery

    • PathBioAnalytics
      is using Julia to develop personalized precision medical treatments
      for patients

  5. Contact Julia Computing

    Please contact us at info@juliacomputing.com for any of the following reasons:

    • Julia Sales and Marketing: Can Julia Computing help you, your
      organization or industry? Are you interested in JuliaFin (for
      finance), JuliaRun (for cloud), JuliaPro Enterprise with indemnity,
      support, training or consulting? Can we make you a more effective
      advocate for Julia within your organization or industry? Please
      contact us at info@juliacomputing.com.

    • Case Studies: Are you using Julia for something interesting,
      unique, exciting or cool? Please check out the case
      studies
      on our Website. If
      you have a Julia story to tell, we want to capture it. Please
      contact us at info@juliacomputing.com and we will follow up with
      you for more information.