Julia London Meetup

A meetup at short notice will hopefully put everyone in the mood for JuliaCon in three weeks time. Since Chris Rackauckas is in town next week, getting together on Monday seems like a good idea. We'll meet at the UCL Artifical Intelligence Center at 90 High Holborn.

We will have a talk by Mosè Giordano who will detail the effort to run Julia code on the Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU), a massively parallel accelerator developed by Graphcore and powered by 1472 cores.

While Julia natively runs only on capable enough CPUs, the [`GPUCompiler.jl`](https://github.com/JuliaGPU/GPUCompiler.jl) package allows generating code for other devices where Julia itself wouldn't be able to run (for example because of memory constraints or lack of support), thus offloading specific tasks to accelerators or other dedicated hardware.

The Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU) is an accelerator for massively parallel workflows developed by Graphcore and powered by 1472 cores. The IPU is typically employed in machine-learning applications through the optimised libraries developed by Graphcore, but the flexibility of this processor makes it suitable also for many other numerical programs. Julia offers the opportunity to write high-level custom code that can be compiled down to native code for the IPU with `GPUCompiler.jl`, without having to directly interface to the SDK provided by Graphcore.

We will end with an open ended discussion about all things Julia, and possibly retire to a pub nearby. Pizza will be provided.