Advanced Python Programming

First steps with Numba

Getting started with Numba is fairly straightforward. As a first example, we will implement a function that calculates the sum of squares of an array. The function definition is as follows:

    def sum_sq(a):        result = 0        N = len(a)

        for i in range(N):            result += a[i]        return result

To set up this function with Numba, it is sufficient to apply the nb.jit decorator:

    from numba import nb    @nb.jit    def sum_sq(a):        ...

The nb.jit decorator won't do much when applied. However, when the function will be invoked for the first time, Numba will detect the type of the input argument, a , and compile a specialized, performant version of the original function.

To measure the performance gain obtained by the Numba compiler, we can compare ...