Scientists spend more and more time writing, maintaining, and debugging software. While techniques for doing this efficiently have evolved, only few scientists have been trained to use them. As a result, instead of doing their research, they spend far too much time writing deficient code and reinventing the wheel. In this course we will present a selection of advanced programming techniques, incorporating theoretical lectures and practical exercises tailored to the needs of a programming scientist. New skills will be tested in a real programming project: we will team up to develop an entertaining scientific computer game.
We use the Python programming language for the entire course. Python works as a simple programming language for beginners, but more importantly, it also works great in scientific simulations and data analysis. We show how clean language design, ease of extensibility, and the great wealth of open source libraries for scientific computing and data visualization are driving Python to become a standard tool for the programming scientist.
This school is targeted at Master or PhD students and Post-docs from all areas of science. Competence in Python or in another language such as Java, C/C++, MATLAB, or Mathematica is absolutely required. Basic knowledge of Python is assumed. Participants without any prior experience with Python should work through the proposed introductory materials before the course.
Download the original announcement: pdf
Date & Location
September 1–6, 2013. Zürich, Switzerland 
Information about the venue, the city of Zürich, travel, and accommodation
The school has already taken place. Read the results of the evaluation survey 
Applications
You can apply on-line. Here is a preview of the application form.
Applications must be submitted before 23:59 CEST, May 1, 2013. The application process is closed: We received 177 applications! Notifications of acceptance will be sent by June 1, 2013. Participants have been selected. If you missed the deadline, write to python-info@g-node.org to be put on the announcement list for next year.
No fee is charged but participants should take care of travel, living, and accommodation expenses.
Candidates will be selected on the basis of their profile. Places are limited: acceptance rate is usually around 20%.
Prerequisites
You are encouraged to go through the introductory material.
Students
Program
Day-by-day schedule with links to video recordings, lecture notes, exercises and solutions
Social events and local attractions
Day0 (Sun Sep 1): Best Programming Practices
- Best Practices, Development Methodologies and the Zen of Python
- Version control with git
- Object-oriented programming & design patterns
Day1 (Mon Sep 2): Software Carpentry
- Test-driven development, unit testing & quality assurance
- Debugging, profiling and benchmarking techniques
- Advanced Python I: idioms, useful built-in data structures, generators
- Programming in teams
Day2 (Tue Sep 3): Scientific Tools for Python
- Advanced NumPy
- The Quest for Speed (intro): Interfacing to C with Cython
- Best practices in data visualization
Day3 (Wed Sep 4): The Quest for Speed
- Writing parallel applications in Python
- Python 3: why should I care
- Programming project
Day4 (Thu Sep 5): Efficient Memory Management
- When parallelization does not help: the starving CPUs problem
- Advanced Python II: decorators and context managers
- Programming project
Day5 (Fri Sep 6): Practical Software Development
- Programming project
- The Pelita Tournament
Lectures start at 8:30 and finish around 18:30. During the day we will have short breaks (coffee & tea provided), and a long lunch break. The last half hour every evening is dedicated to tutors' consultation: Tutors will answer your questions and give suggestions for your own projects.
On Sunday, September 1 registration starts at 8:00: please try to be there as soon as possible, the lecture starts at 8:30 sharp.
On Friday, September 6, we are going to have a little farewell party that you should not miss: book your return travel not before Saturday, September 7
Faculty
- Francesc Alted, Continuum Analytics Inc.,
USA - Pietro Berkes, Enthought Inc.,
UK - Valentin Haenel, freelance developer and consultant, Berlin,
Germany - Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek, Krasnow Institute, George Mason University, USA
- Eilif Muller, Blue Brain Project, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne,
Switzerland - Emanuele Olivetti, NeuroInformatics Laboratory, Fondazione Bruno Kessler and University of Trento,
Italy - Rike-Benjamin Schuppner, Technologit GbR, Germany
- Bartosz Teleńczuk, Unité de Neurosciences Information et Complexité, CNRS, Gif-sur-Yvette,
France - Stéfan van der Walt, Applied Mathematics, Stellenbosch University,
South Africa - Bastian Venthur, Berlin Institute of Technology and Bernstein Focus Neurotechnology, Germany
- Niko Wilbert, TNG Technology Consulting GmbH, Germany
- Tiziano Zito, Institute for Theoretical Biology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
Previous Schools
- Kiel, Germany, September 2—7, 2012.
- St Andrews, UK, September 11—16, 2011.
- Trento, Italy, October 4—8, 2010.
- Warsaw, Poland, February 8—12, 2010.
- Berlin, Germany, August 31—September 4, 2009.
You may be interested in the results of our evaluation surveys: Kiel, St Andrews, Trento, Warsaw, Berlin.
Organizers
Organized by Tiziano Zito (head)
for the German Neuroinformatics Node of the INCF 
,
Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek,
and
Nicola Chiapolini with colleagues from the Physik-Institut, University of Zurich (local organizers).
Contact
For any further questions please write to python-info@g-node.org.
Sponsoring
We gratefully acknowledge support by a GRC Grant from the UZH Graduate Campus as well as from our sponsors:
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Bartosz Teleńczuk gratefully acknowledges financial support from CNRS and European Community (BrainScales project).
Bastian Venthur was supported by grants of the BMBF (FKZ 01GQ0850 and 16SV5839).
Machines for parallel computing exercises were graciously provided by GC3, the Grid Computing Competence Center.