Performance

30 articles · Latest April 9, 2026

eScience Editorial Team·Apr 9, 2026

FOSDEM 2026: Observations and key takeaways

If you missed FOSDEM 2026 — the largest conference dedicated to open-source software — you can still absorb some of the experience as shared by NLeSC RSEs Flavio Hafner, Ole Mussm...

Netherlands eScience Center·Nov 6, 2025

From PhD Student to Auto-Tuning GPU Expert. Meet Floris-Jan.

Floris-Jan Willemsen has been a PhD student at the Netherlands eScience Center since 2021, working on auto-tuning GPU software as part of the CORTEX project under the supervision o...

Flavio Hafner·Jun 17, 2025

Empirically evaluating privacy in machine learning III: functional & gaussian differential privacy

1 Using statistics to think like a hacker, so we can avoid them! The Greek letter lambda, symbol of functional programming.This post is the third in a series on differential privac...

Olga Lyashevska·Jan 23, 2025

How to run a containerized Agent-Based Model on HPC

This blog was written by Faruk Diblen and Olga Lyashevska. Imagine you are preparing Torta Caprese for your friend’s birthday. You have a recipe that consistently delights everyone...

Peter Kalverla·Nov 21, 2023

Cracking the (moisture) tracking code

An exclusive interview with our project partners This post is part of a series on our 2021 Small Scale Initiative Call in Software Performance Optimization. This week’s highlight:...

Pablo Rodríguez-Sánchez·Nov 9, 2023

Automatic differentiation from scratch

A surprisingly simple and elegant way to teach your computer how to perform derivatives, with some Julia (and Python) examples Photo by Crissy Jarvis on Unsplash First, a disclaime...

Florian Huber·Jun 26, 2023

Mcfly: An easy-to-use tool for deep learning for time series classification

A new mcfly 3.0 release is out. See how it works and how it can help you to apply deep learning to time series classification. Florian Huber·Apr 15, 2020 Once the models are genera...

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Lieke de Boer·Jun 8, 2023

NL-RSE: What Open Science can learn from Open Source

NL-RSE meetups are bimonthly events where the Dutch community for Research Software Engineers comes together to learn new skills or hear inspiring talks by experts in the field of...

eScience Editorial Team·Mar 2, 2023

Minds for Mobile Agents: speeding up social distancing simulations

This blog post is written by University of Amsterdam researchers Charlotte Tanis and Andrew Heathcote, who participated in the Small-Scale Initiative for Software Performance Optim...

Malte Lüken·Dec 13, 2022

Immaculate Speech and Hallucinations

When (not) to use OpenAI’s Whisper to transcribe audio in a social sciences project Using Whisper off-the-shelf in this case might bias the results because it tends to “polish” the...

eScience Editorial Team·Aug 16, 2022

Our favourite high performance programming tools

Does your code need a performance boost? Ask us! Photo by Alenka Skvarc on Unsplash We hope you are relaxed and enjoying your holiday period. We really do. So it may seem ironic th...

eScience Editorial Team·Jun 13, 2022

Studying political symbolism in Turkish TV dramas with machine learning

Studying political symbolism in Turkish TV dramas with machine learning eScience Editorial Team·Jun 10, 2022 Faced with a challenge of this type, Machine Learning can come to the r...

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eScience Editorial Team·May 23, 2022

The mystery of glass: why machine learning can help us

This blog is part of our blog series: The Small-Scale Initiative on Machine Learning, how did it go?, where groups who were invited to participate in a project with eScience Center...

Stef Smeets·May 4, 2022

Forget about Jupyter Notebooks — showcase your research using Dashboards

The snippet below generates some data (a normal distribution), fits it, and creates a matplotlib plot out of it. It takes three parameters, muin, stdin, and size. My cool python sc...

Abel Soares Siqueira·Feb 11, 2022

Can Python with Julia be faster than low-level code?

Part 3 of the series on achieving high performance with high-level code Here comes a new challenger: It is Julia. Photo by Joran Quinten on Unsplash ( https://unsplash.com/photos/M...

Abel Soares Siqueira·Jan 19, 2022

How to call Julia code from Python

A three-part series on achieving high performance with high-level code Caption: Astronaut carrying Python and Julia. Photo by Brian McGowan on Unsplash ( https://unsplash.com/photo...

Peter Kalverla·Sep 20, 2021

Plotting gridded data on a web map: Python and/or Javascript?

But what if you want to plot your own data? While there are many resources on how to use existing tile or web-map services, I struggled to find out how to make my own. Eventually,...

Patrick Bos·Mar 5, 2021

Automate chores with GitHub Actions

How I keep my Heroku web-app’s data up-to-date automatically Scientists, open source developers, and basically probably most people, have to deal with one common obstacle in life:...

eScience Editorial Team·Oct 9, 2020

Using C++ in a web app with WebAssembly

By Stefan Verhoeven, Faruk Diblen, Jurriaan H. Spaaks, Adam Belloum, and Christiaan Meijer. Let’s say you have some C++ code laying around that you would like to make available to...

Pablo Rodríguez-Sánchez·Aug 17, 2020

Parallel R in a nutshell

Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash Loops are, by definition, repetitive tasks. Although it is not part of the definition, loops also tend to be boring. Luckily for us, computers ar...

Netherlands eScience Center·Apr 2, 2020

Can we teach AI’s speech by simulating young children’s ability to learn spoken language?

8 Today, we can´t imagine life without voice controlled intelligent systems such as Siri, Google Assistant, car navigation systems and other applications. Such systems use a speech...

Johan Hidding·Jan 16, 2020

Parallel programming in Python

Depending on your level of Python expertise, you might implement such an algorithm in different ways. In an introductory Python course we could write this function as follows. impo...

Hanno Spreeuw·Oct 21, 2019

eScience trends from ADASS 2019

The 2019 Conference on Astronomical Data Analysis and Software Systems (ADASS, 353 participants) took place in Groningen between 6 and 10 October, 2019. The aim of this annual conf...

Sonja Georgievska·Jun 12, 2019

explainable ai exit or infinite loop

> Let us simplify before we try to explain Photo by Franck V. on Unsplash Before we start, let’s make it clear: by AI here I mean computational statistics, and by explainable — wel...

Florian Huber·Mar 4, 2019

superhuman blog post

#demystifyAI series (this small series aims at putting important AI-related aspects into perspective) Why you shouldn’t be afraid of AI tools occasionally performing superhuman in...

Felipe·Jan 9, 2019

dealing with dragons and monsters best practices for handling legacy code

> “So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their endings.” > ― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit Typical debugging session When I started my PhD in the field of computational chem...

Patrick Bos·Sep 3, 2018

50 times faster data loading for pandas no problem

Loading irregular data into Pandas using C++ Irregular pandas If Python is the reigning king of data science, Pandas is the kingdom’s bureaucracy. As recognized by Pandas creator W...

Patrick Bos·Aug 6, 2018

floating (point) butterfly effect

Searching for tiny bugs that cause big problems I know it’s a bug, but it’s so pretty… what harm could it do? Last year, I took a few weeks to look into floating point round-off er...

Erik Tjong Kim Sang·Mar 20, 2018

active learning

Computers perform better than humans in arithmetic and chess but if there is one task in which humans are superior it is image processing. But for how long? In 2015 there was a br...

eScience Editorial Team·Jul 17, 2017

an ambition for the global astronomical community

Making the data produced by the rejuvenated Westerbork Telescope more open for, and delivered faster to, the astronomical community Joeri van Leeuwen, Dutch astrophysicist, ASTRON...