34: José Valim reveals Project Nx

José Valim visits and finally publicly reveals what Project Nx is! He and others have been working on it for 3 months and he's finally ready to unveil it. José will speak more about it at the LambdaDays conference, demonstrating it with code and announcing the release and availability of the OpenSource code.


Nx stands for "Numerical Elixir". The Nx project brings a unique numerical mode to Elixir along with GPU support. This important work lays the foundation for a powerful new era with data science in Elixir! Listen in as Jose discusses the details of how this works, how it came about, the goals of the project, what this means for the community, and what comes next.

Show Notes online - http://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/34

Elixir Community News

• https://elixirforum.com/t/introducing-elixirls-the-elixir-language-server/5857/122 – ElixirLS version 0.6.3 released
• https://github.com/elixir-lsp/elixir-ls/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md – ElixirLS Changelog
• https://codesync.global/conferences/code-beam-v-america-2021/ – CodeBEAM American conference dates March 10-12
• https://hexdocs.pm/oban/changelog.html#2-4-0-2021-01-26 – Oban 2.4.0 released
• https://twitter.com/sorentwo/status/1354099475191652352 – Oban performance improvement charts
• https://github.com/wintermeyer/phx_tailwind_generators – Phoenix TailwindCSS generator
• https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix/pull/4191 – Phoenix JavaScript gets more modern with Phoenix ES modules
• https://fullstackphoenix.com/boilerplates/new – Feedback! We learned about the site FullStackPhoenix which helps you start new projects already setup with several options for how to configure it.

Do you have some Elixir news to share? Tell us at @ThinkingElixir or email at [email protected]

Discussion Resources

• Nx stands for "Numerical Elixir"
• https://elixirforum.com/t/anyone-who-wants-to-speculate-about-this-tweet-from-jose/35772/68 – A great text summary of the announcement found on ElixirForum.
• https://twitter.com/josevalim/status/1356880707474370560 – José Valim released the new Nx logo during our recording. The cute animal is a Numbat!
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbat
• https://github.com/erlang/otp/pull/2890 – José's pull request to add 16-bit floats in bitstrings to OTP
• https://numpy.org/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softmax_function
• https://pragprog.com/titles/smgaelixir/genetic-algorithms-in-elixir/
• https://elixirforum.com/t/pelemay-formerly-hastega-challenge-for-gpgpu-on-elixir/22986
• https://erlang.org/doc/man/erl_nif.html#dirty_nifs – Information on Dirty NIFs
• https://twitter.com/bcardarella
• https://www.tensorflow.org/xla
• https://tvm.apache.org/
• https://mlir.llvm.org/
• https://github.com/google/jax
• https://julialang.org/
• https://www.lambdadays.org/lambdadays2021/jose-valim – LambdaDays speaker page
• https://www.lambdadays.org/lambdadays2021#programme – José speaks on day 2
• Promo code for 15% off LambdaDays tickets! Just use "thinkingelixir15"
• https://twitter.com/josevalim
• https://twitter.com/sean_moriarity
• https://twitter.com/elixirlang

Guest Information

• https://twitter.com/josevalim – on Twitter
• https://github.com/josevalim – on Github
• https://dashbit.co/ – Dashbit website and blog

Find us online

• Message the show - @ThinkingElixir
• Email the show - [email protected]
• Mark Ericksen - @brainlid
• David Bernheisel - @bernheisel
• Cade Ward - @cadebward