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 supposed to know the basics of Python to participate in the lectures!

You are encouraged to go through the introductory material.

Students

Confirmed participants.

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