2025-07-24 –, Main Room 3
Sparse methods are an increasingly important subsection of numerical computing algorithms. As datasets continue to grow many scientific and business problems become computationally infeasible without harnessing sparsity across the entire pipeline from input datasets, to intermediate results and final outputs. This minisymposium will bring together users and developers of Julia's sparse ecosystem to present on recent advances, identify capability gaps, and discuss the future of the ecosystem.
The Sparse and Graph Computing in Julia minisymposium will include talks and updates from maintainers of major sparse and graph packages in Julia such as SparseArrays.jl, Graphs.jl, Finch.jl, GraphBLAS.jl, etc. We also anticipate inviting one or more outside speakers to increase cross-pollination between the Julia sparse community and developers of other sparse ecosystems in Python, C/C++, etc.
In addition to updates on existing and upcoming packages, we expect to solicit talks, experiences, and discussions which answer the following questions:
- How does julia impact your experience programming with sparse arrays?
- What is missing from the Julia Sparse ecosystem?
- What is helpful in the Julia Sparse ecosystem?
- In what application areas do you most frequently use sparse arrays or graph structures? Does Julia excel or falter in any of these areas?
- What is your experience with how Julia's sparse ecosystem interfaces with other parts of the ecosystem including automatic differentiation, distributed computing, etc?
We expect to create a hybrid program consisting of invited talks and a self-managed CfP.
I am a postdoc at MIT advised by Saman Amarasinghe, and an incoming professor at Georgia Tech! I am inspired to make programming high-performance computers more productive, efficient, and accessible. My research primarily focuses on using compilers to adapt programs to the structure of data, bridging the gap between program flexibility and data structure flexibility. I’m the author of the Finch array programming language, which supports a wide variety of programming constructs on sparse, run-length-encoded, banded, or otherwise structured arrays.