Erik Welch
Erik Welch is a senior system software engineer on the RAPIDS cuGraph team at NVIDIA. He has 20 years' experience using Python as a scientist, engineer, and open-source developer on a wide range of data and high-performance computing problems. He primarily works on nx-cugraph, an accelerated backend to NetworkX, and is a primary maintainer of the popular toolz library.
Sessions
As scientific computing increasingly relies on diverse hardware (CPUs, GPUs, etc) and data structures, libraries face pressure to support multiple backends while maintaining a consistent API. This talk presents practical considerations for adding dispatching to existing libraries, enabling seamless integration with external backends. Using NetworkX and scikit-image as case studies, we demonstrate how they evolved to become a common API with multiple implementations, handle backend-specific behaviors, and ensure robustness through testing and documentation. We also discuss technical challenges, differences in approaches, community adoption strategies, and the broader implications for the SciPy ecosystem.