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

August 31—September 5, 2015. Munich, Germany

Information about the venue, the city of Munich, travel, and accommodation

Applications

~~You can apply on-line~~. Here is a preview of the application form.

Applications must be submitted before 23:59 UTC, March 31, 2015. The application process is closed: We received 300 applications and are in the process of reviewing them to select the 30 participants! Notifications of acceptance will be sent by May 1, 2015. 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.

FENS and IBRO-PERC provide 4 stipends of 750€ for master and/or PhD students interested in attending this course. Through these stipends FENS and IBRO-PERC aim to encourage and promote international experience of students; hence, students that are currently residing or studying in Germany are not eligible for a FENS and IBRO-PERC stipend. You can apply for the FENS and IBRO-PERC directly in our application form.

Candidates will be selected on the basis of their profile and motivation. Places are limited: acceptance rate this year was 10%.

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 lecture and exercise materials

Day0 (Mon Aug 31): Best Programming Practices

Best Practices for Scientific Computing
Version control with git and how to contribute to Open Source with github
Object-oriented programming & design patterns

Day1 (Tue Sep 1): Software Carpentry

Test-driven development, unit testing & quality assurance
Debugging, profiling and benchmarking techniques
Advanced Python: generators, decorators, and context managers

Day2 (Wed Sep 2): Scientific Tools for Python

Advanced NumPy
The Quest for Speed (intro): Interfacing to C with Cython
Contributing to Open Source Software/Programming in teams

Day3 (Thu Sep 3): The Quest for Speed

Writing parallel applications in Python
Python 3: why should I care
Programming project

Day4 (Fri Sep 4): Efficient Memory Management

When parallelization does not help: the starving CPUs problem
Programming project

Day5 (Sat Sep 5): Practical Software Development

Programming project
The Pelita Tournament

Lectures start at 8:30 sharp 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 Saturday, September 5, we are going to have a little closing party that you should not miss: book your return travel not before Sunday, September 6

Faculty

Pietro Berkes, Enthought Inc., Cambridge
Marianne Corvellec, Plotly Technologies Inc., Montréal
Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek, Krasnow Institute, George Mason University, Fairfax
Eilif Muller, Blue Brain Project, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Juan Nunez-Iglesias, Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative, University of Melbourne
Rike-Benjamin Schuppner, Institute for Theoretical Biology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Bartosz Teleńczuk, European Institute for Theoretical Neuroscience, CNRS, Paris
Nelle Varoquaux, Centre for Computational Biology Mines ParisTech, Institut Curie, U900 INSERM, Paris
Tiziano Zito, Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH