JuliaCon workshops

[dmm]

JuliaCon this year is 8 days of workshops (July 20-27), following by 3 days of the main conference (July 28-30).

The list of workshops is here: juliacon.org/2021/workshops/

The most interesting for me is the workshop on the next generation of autodiff systems (July 27), "Diffractor: Next-Gen AD for Julia": pretalx.com/juliacon2021/talk/review/MJ7T9LXLXNDWHPW9WJN7SGTWU7L9QMJW

All workshops start at 10am United States East Coast time and last 3 hours, two parallel workshops each day; if you don't care about interactive real-time aspects, youtube recordings will be available...

Full schedule (UTC time default, can switch to US East Coast): pretalx.com/juliacon2021/schedule/

Comments

[dmm]

So, it's time to overview the workshop (one more day of them left, and we know everything at this point).

1) Diffractor is finally released, thanks to the workshop pushing the authors to do that: https://juliadiff.org/

https://github.com/JuliaDiff/Diffractor.jl

Diffractor workshop itself is going to be cancelled/postponed, because of the speaker's illness: https://twitter.com/KenoFischer/status/1419680777135136771

(The chaotic times we live in.)

I am going to try it (I've spent a lot of time lately working with Zygote and ended up being less than happy so far, to say the least; but it might be that I just need some help from more experienced people).

2) The most non-trivial workshop was on quantum computing. It was conducted by the Amazon Braket people, and while the canonical Amazon Braket API is in Python, there is a full-strength Julia API as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEd6driz37w - that's video recording of the live session (I think even the live chat can be replayed)

https://pretalx.com/juliacon2021/talk/V3N73B/ - that's the description of the workshop

https://pigeonhole.at/QUANTUM/q/2333682 - that's the Q&A for this workshop

Now, speaking of Amazon Braket: https://aws.amazon.com/braket/

You can either work on a simulator (which you can also just run on your home machine), or you can work on a real hardware from one of the three providers at the moment: https://aws.amazon.com/braket/hardware-providers/

I don't understand much about IonQ, but you can work on actual 32-qubit quantum processors from Rigetti: https://aws.amazon.com/braket/hardware-providers/rigetti/

That's not too bad, you can process 4 billion states in parallel, not enough to "take over the world", but enough to do interesting things.

You can also use D-Wave quantum annealers, some of which are pretty formidable at this stage ("Advantage QPU" has more than 5000 qubits; note that quantum annealers are not full-strength quantum computers, but are good for specialized problems; I wonder if people would be open to calling then "semi-quantum computers"): https://aws.amazon.com/braket/hardware-providers/dwave/

Amazon Braket is also actively hiring; they seem to be quite bullish on the future trajectory of this.