Julia Computing’s Alan Edelman Presents ‘Julia’s Role in Healing the Earth’ at TEDxMIT on December 6

Cambridge, MA – Julia Computing co-founder and Chief Scientist Alan Edelman will be a TEDxMIT speaker on Friday December 6 as part of the TEDxMIT Operation Earth event. The subject of his talk is ‘Julia’s Role in Healing the Earth’.

Alan Edelman is a co-creator of Julia, MIT Professor of Applied Mathematics, Principal Investigator at the MIT Julia Lab and winner of the Sidney Fernbach Award, Charles Babbage Prize, Gordon Bell Prize and many other awards.

For more information, please visit TEDxMIT.org.

About Julia and Julia Computing

Julia is the fastest high-performance open source computing language for data, analytics, algorithmic trading, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and other scientific and numeric computing applications. Julia solves the two language problem by combining the ease of use of Python and R with the speed of C++. Julia provides parallel computing capabilities out of the box and unlimited scalability with minimal effort. Julia has been downloaded more than 11 million times and is used at more than 1,500 universities. Julia co-creators are the winners of the 2019 James H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software and the 2019 Sidney Fernbach Award. Julia has run at petascale on 650,000 cores with 1.3 million threads to analyze over 56 terabytes of data using Cori, one of the ten largest and most powerful supercomputers in the world.

Julia Computing was founded in 2015 by all the creators of Julia to provide products including JuliaTeam, JuliaSure and JuliaRun to businesses and researchers using Julia.

DifferentialEquations.jl v6.9.0: Automated Multi-GPU Implicit ODE Solving, SciPy/R Bindings

By: SciML

Re-posted from: https://sciml.ai/2019/12/03/MultiGPU.html

Cluster Multi-GPU Support in DiffEqGPU

The DiffEqGPU automated GPU parallelism tools now support multiple GPUs. The
README now shows that one can do things like:

# Setup processes with different CUDA devices
using Distributed
addprocs(numgpus)
import CUDAdrv, CUDAnative

let gpuworkers = asyncmap(collect(zip(workers(), CUDAdrv.devices()))) do (p, d)
  remotecall_wait(CUDAnative.device!, p, d)
  p
end

to setup each individual process with a separate GPU, and then the standard
usage of DiffEqGPU.jl:

function lorenz(du,u,p,t)
 @inbounds begin
     du[1] = p[1]*(u[2]-u[1])
     du[2] = u[1]*(p[2]-u[3]) - u[2]
     du[3] = u[1]*u[2] - p[3]*u[3]
 end
 nothing
end

u0 = Float32[1.0;0.0;0.0]
tspan = (0.0f0,100.0f0)
p = (10.0f0,28.0f0,8/3f0)
prob = ODEProblem(lorenz,u0,tspan,p)
prob_func = (prob,i,repeat) -> remake(prob,p=rand(Float32,3).*p)
monteprob = EnsembleProblem(prob, prob_func = prob_func)
@time sol = solve(monteprob,Tsit5(),EnsembleGPUArray(),trajectories=100_000,
                  batch_size = 10_000, saveat=1.0f0)

will now make use of these GPUs per batch of trajectories. We can see effective
parallel solving of over 100,000 ODEs all simultaneously using this approach
on just a few compute nodes!

SciPy and deSolve (R) (+Updated MATLAB) Common Interface Bindings for Ease of Translation

With the new SciPyDiffEq.jl,
deSolveDiffEq.jl, and the
update MATLABDiffEq.jl bindings,
you can now solve common interface defined ordinary differential equations using
the solver suites from Python, R, and MATLAB respectively. These libraries have
been developed due to popular demand as a large influx of users from these
communities who want to ensure that their Julia-translated models are correct.
Now, one can install these solvers can double check their models with the
original libraries to double check that the translation is correct.

To see this in action, the following solves the Lorenz equations with SciPy’s
solve_ivp’s RK45, deSolve’s (R) lsoda wrapper, and MATLAB’s ode45:

using SciPyDiffEq, MATLABDiffEq, deSolveDiffEq

function lorenz(u,p,t)
 du1 = 10.0(u[2]-u[1])
 du2 = u[1]*(28.0-u[3]) - u[2]
 du3 = u[1]*u[2] - (8/3)*u[3]
 [du1, du2, du3]
end
tspan = (0.0,10.0)
u0 = [1.0,0.0,0.0]
prob = ODEProblem(lorenz,u0,tspan)
sol = solve(prob,SciPyDiffEq.RK45())
sol = solve(prob,MATLABDiffEq.ode45())
sol = solve(prob,deSolveDiffEq.lsoda())

As an added bonus, this gives us a fairly simple way to track performance
differences between the common ODE solver packages of each language. A new
benchmark page is focused on cross language wrapper overhead and showcases the performance differences
between these language’s differential equation suites on 4 ODE test problems
(non-stiff and stiff). For example, on a system of 7 stiff ODEs, we see the
following:

ODE benchmarks

which showcases the native Julia solvers as the fastest, benchmarking close to
50x faster than MATLAB, 100x faster than deSolve (R), and nearly 10,000x faster
than SciPy. Thus, with these new tools, users can have a one line change to both
ensure their models have translated correctly while understanding the true
performance difference in their real-world context.

Automated GPU-based Parameter Parallelism Support for Stiff ODEs and Event Handling

DiffEqGPU now supports stiff ODEs through implicit and Rosenbrock methods, and
callbacks (both ContinuousCallback and DiscreteCallback) are allowed. To
see this in action, one could for example do the following:

function lorenz(du,u,p,t)
 @inbounds begin
     du[1] = p[1]*(u[2]-u[1])
     du[2] = u[1]*(p[2]-u[3]) - u[2]
     du[3] = u[1]*u[2] - p[3]*u[3]
 end
 nothing
end

u0 = Float32[1.0;0.0;0.0]
tspan = (0.0f0,100.0f0)
p = (10.0f0,28.0f0,8/3f0)

function lorenz_jac(J,u,p,t)
 @inbounds begin
     σ = p[1]
     ρ = p[2]
     β = p[3]
     x = u[1]
     y = u[2]
     z = u[3]
     J[1,1] = -σ
     J[2,1] = ρ - z
     J[3,1] = y
     J[1,2] = σ
     J[2,2] = -1
     J[3,2] = x
     J[1,3] = 0
     J[2,3] = -x
     J[3,3] = -β
 end
 nothing
end

function lorenz_tgrad(J,u,p,t)
 nothing
end

func = ODEFunction(lorenz,jac=lorenz_jac,tgrad=lorenz_tgrad)
prob_jac = ODEProblem(func,u0,tspan,p)
prob_func = (prob,i,repeat) -> remake(prob,p=rand(Float32,3).*p)
monteprob_jac = EnsembleProblem(prob_jac, prob_func = prob_func)

solve(monteprob_jac,Rodas5(linsolve=LinSolveGPUSplitFactorize()),EnsembleGPUArray(),dt=0.1,trajectories=10_000,saveat=1.0f0)
solve(monteprob_jac,TRBDF2(linsolve=LinSolveGPUSplitFactorize()),EnsembleGPUArray(),dt=0.1,trajectories=10_000,saveat=1.0f0)

This solves the Lorenz equations with Rosenbrock and implicit ODE solvers for
10,000 different parameters. On an example stiff ODE we’ve been testing
(26 ODEs), a single RTX 2080 card was 5x faster than a multithreaded 16 core
Xeon computer, meaning the time savings to do a parameter sweep with just one
GPU can be tremendous, even (especially) on a stiff ODE.

Stiff ODE Linear Solver Performance Improvements

Thanks to Yingbo Ma (@YingboMa), our implicit ODE solvers got a pretty major
improvement in certain stiff ODEs which have fast oscillatory terms. Now it’s
hard to find a stiff ODE benchmark where a native Julia method isn’t performing
the best, except for super large systems where Newton-Krylov methods are used.
Our next goal is to better enhance the performance of our Newton-Krylov support.

More Precise Package Maintenance: Strict Versioning and Bounds

All of JuliaDiffEq now has upper bounds on its packages, along with CompatHelper
installed so that every dependency change gets an automatic pull request and a
notification to the JuliaDiffEq maintainers to inform us about changes in the
wider Julia ecosystem. This should help us stay on top of all changes and keep
the system stable.

Next Directions

Here’s some things to look forward to:

  • Automated matrix-free finite difference PDE operators
  • Jacobian reuse efficiency in Rosenbrock-W methods
  • Native Julia fully implicit ODE (DAE) solving in OrdinaryDiffEq.jl
  • High Strong Order Methods for Non-Commutative Noise SDEs
  • Stochastic delay differential equations