Highlights from EPC 2006

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Highlights from EPC 2006

• Vincenzo Innocente
• On behalf of the
• Local Organizing Committee

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EuroPython at CERN

• EuroPython conference organized by SFT this year!
• Three days
• Parallel sessions in Bld 40
• Keynotes and Lightning in main auditorium
• Dinner in the Globe
• 280 participants
• 100 presentations (w/o lightning)
• 5 by CERN

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Schedule

• 4 parallel sessions (in bld 40)
• All synchronized
• 5 minutes pause between talks
• Easy for people to move from one session to
  another

Plenary Lightning key notes (in Main Amphi)
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Scientific Program

• 7 tracks
• Python in Science
• Python Language Libraries
• Agile Development
• Web Frameworks
• Business and Applications
• Teaching
• Games and Entertainment

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Statisticsby Sebastian Lopienski

• 100 abstracts
• words 13.6k
• unique words 2.7k
• some chosen words
• plugin 18
• secur 2
• embedd 4
• performance 13
• improve 11
• interoperability 3
• distribut 22

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Community

• Who
• Wide age spectrum
• Many in post-doc age-range
• All 5 continents
• Very few women (1-2, all managers?)
• Where
• Company developing Software Solutions
• Revenue from Selling custom products or services
• Find business advantages
• In using open source software (contribute to its
  development)
• Develop components reusable beyond a specific
  project
• Research Labs
• Domain specific applications
• Reuse in the community (adapting to pre-existing
  habits)

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Community

• What
• Core language development
• Web framework, web applications
• Software development tools (web based)
• Scientific data processing, visualization
• No sys-admin, net-admin, embedded-software,
  office automation
• Why
• Hear news about Language, Libraries, key products
  (Zope,)
• Discuss, propose, complain
• Present their products
• In many cases just a spin-off component
• Work (in Sprint sessions)

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Messages

• Python as
• THE integration framework
• THE Business Domain Language
• THE embedded scripting language
• Language for rapid-prototyping,
  extreme-programming, just-in-time deployment
• Python is faster than Assembler

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Keynotes

• Alan Kay
• Xerox PARC, etc
• Children First!
• Guido van Rossum
• Python BDFL (Benevolent Dictator For Life)
• Python 3000

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MGL Tools
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The Indico Technology

• Main programming language Python
• Runs on Apache using the Python module mod_python
• Persistence based in ZODB (Zope Object Database)
• Transparency no need for explicit read/writes of
  the objects
• Fits very well with Indico complex object model
• Proven performance and scalability
• Timetable generation libXML, libXSLt python
  bindings
• Portable technologies runs on Windows, linux
• Export gateways
• iCalendar XML PDF outputs
• OAI (Open Archive Initiatives) for ensuring
  integration with other services
• Standard protocol for information exchange
  between digital libraries
• Allows to expose conference data
• Allows other systems to fetch conference data and
  build services over it
• Simple mechanism ? XML over HTTP

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The Invenio Technology

• Main programming language Python
• Runs on Apache using the Python module mod_python
  
• Uses MySQL RDBMS
• Take advantage of fully featured query language
• Invenio home made Indexes
• Internal representation with XML-MARC
• Export gateways
• Multiple output formats HTML, XML, MARC, OAI,
  DC, etc.
• Some modules
• Still in PHP (slowly moved to Python)
• Some in Common Lisp (BibCheck)

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Index Space Design (II)

• Two important speed factors to consider
• speed of set intersections (Web App Server)
• speed of set marshalling (Web App lt-gt DB Server)
• Data structures tested
• sorted (lists, Patricia trees)
• unsorted (hashed sets, binary vectors)
• fast prototyping (Python)
• throw-away coding, organic-growth software
• development model
• typical search time gain 4.0 sec ? 0.2 sec
• typical indexing time loss 7 hours ? 4 days
• binary vectors found the best compromise
• (for all types of sets)

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Performance Benchmarks (2002)

• Testing marshalling/intersection/union/unmarshalli
  ng
• Bytecode interpreted language study (Python,
  Java)
• Python faster than Java (mainly due to
  marshalling)
• Machine code compiled language study (ML, Lisp)
• OCaml, CMU CL 3 times faster than Python C libs
• CMU CL best scalable intersecting 6M records in
  0.01 sec, 30M records in 0.04 sec
• Data structure study
• OCaml, 3,000,000 records bit vectors 0.43 sec,
  hashed sets 1.71 sec, lists 3.76 sec, Patricia
  trees do not scale well for dense sets
• Python fast enough for production (1M records)
• fast C modules Numeric (byte/bit), Marshal, Psyco

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The of Python

• Clean aesthetical language
• Easy to learn, important for many internship
  students and temporary members working on the
  project
• Very good for rapid prototyping organic-growth
  development
• Plenty of ready-to-be-used modules
• Bytecode-compiled only, speed okay for our needs

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Lightning

• 5 minute talks about anything
• Strict timing, no one took longer
• Advertising/promoting
• Demos
• Follow-up/Summary of parallel talks
• Wild Ideas
• In most cases the message passes
• People Google for keywords in the talk

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What I learned

• Easy to organize a conference if Nathalie is the
  boss
• It is possible to have meetings
• With a friendly, cooperative, tolerant atmosphere
• Where speakers keep their timing
• and the audience is not asleep
• There are Communities which value
• Sharing information
• Building reusable software components
• Cooperating in developing the basic building
  blocks
• Become a community around such a common ground

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More?

• Wait for the talk at AA meeting
• Visit
• http//vanrees.org/weblog/topics/europython
• http//indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId
  44
• http//www.europython.org/
• http//www.google.com/search?qeuropython