Dyalog '13 Videos - week 9

[Fiona|Dyalog]

This week's conference videos have a strong emphasis on performance. Go to http://www.dyalog.com/user-meetings/dyalog13.htm to read about Dyalog ’13 and follow the links to the videos.

• Cosmos is a system, written in APL, that can assemble large volumes of data from multiple databases across international locations, analyse it and present the results graphically. Paul Grosvenor describes how his team have made numerous "Cosmos Performance Improvements" by taking advantage of the power of Dyalog APL and memory mapped files to out-perform traditional SQL databases. (http://video.dyalog.com/Dyalog13/?v=oK_XGobiFmM)

• Jay introduces an experimental compiler technology that promises to speed applications up significantly by "Reducing Interpreter Overhead". The compiler produces parse trees when functions are fixed, thereby eliminating some of the run-time cost of the APL interpreter. The Beta version of this compiler (included with version 14.0) has been observed to improve performance by a factor of 2.5 when running utility functions with small arguments. (http://video.dyalog.com/Dyalog13/?v=bDd5EMXvLDI)

• Aaron Hsu discusses his project to construct a "Co-Dfns Compiler", which aims to not only eliminate interpreter overhead, but also deliver massively parallel execution of dfns at some point in the future. In addition to explaining why a compiler should be able to offer significant speed-ups, Aaron also introduces a couple of new language features aimed at making it possible to write "deterministic" concurrent algorithms in APL. (http://video.dyalog.com/Dyalog13/?v=-brW204CXks)

There will be further updates next Friday highlighting the new videos for the week.