Even though, no Julia training events had been held in Sweden before 2022, one conclusion we could draw from the 2021 ENCCS Services Survey was that there is quite a significant interest in training events focused on Julia programming. Julia is a free and open-source programming language designed from the ground up to offer high performance while being simple to write. It thus bridges the gap between high-level interpreted and low-level compiled languages and can rightfully claim to solve the two-language problem – the frequent need to rewrite prototype code in a high-level language to a more performant low-level language.

Reacting to this observation, and anticipating an increasing interest in Julia for scientific and engineering use cases across public and private sectors over the coming years, we have started building competence in Julia programming at ENCCS. New open-source and public training material was developed and on February 15-16 we held our first Julia workshop. Interest in this workshop was indeed high and ENCCS aims to offer additional Julia training workshops later this year.

Becoming familiar with basic Julia syntax was left as a home exercise before the workshop (for those new to the language) and the focus was instead on special features of Julia, some performance tips, and how Julia code can be adapted to run on parallel architectures, including graphical processing units (GPUs). In an accompanying article (link) we provide a brief tour of Julia for high-performance computing.