Lead: Santiago Nunez-Corrales

Members: Minu Mathew Todd Nicholson Vismayak Mohanarajan 


In this Focus Group, we will focus on gathering practice and experience around the following questions:

  • Which factors determine when to use Pandas and when to use Numpy?
  • How do both packages represent data and with which trade-offs?
  • What are adequate ways to access SciPy functions to preserve performance?
  • What can be done when alternatives provided by these packages are exhausted and performance still needs to improve?
  • How large are the gains of using Cython, Numba and FFIs vs plain Python code?
  • Concerns at large: How to gauge, project-wise, the balance between maintainability and performance?

We will pursue the following outcomes:

  • A series of recommendations and good practices that serve the needs of projects, teams and professionals across NCSA
  • Short (30-min) hands-on sessions that demonstrate specific pain points and possible solutions
  • Actions that foster communication between NCSA software developers and open-source package maintainers


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