$ cat google/week/2026-08-24.log
the week in review · Aug 24 – Aug 30, 2026
JAX's performance tuning, Google Cloud's sync, and a deleted API
JAX trimmed fetch time in some workloads and killed the deprecated shard_alike entry point, while Google Cloud Python libraries shipped releases and a lint/format synchronization, marking a week of incremental upgrades.
JAX led with a performance win for `planar_snake` [1], though its impact appears limited to snake workloads. Also impacting GPU execution: a fix restores lowering of multi-dimensional IRFFT to a single C2R transform, improving speed on that path [2]. Elsewhere, an update to remove dynamic discovery of unknown ROCm wheels [3] simplifies dependency management, and sciPy 1.18.1 lock files were regenerated [4]. A planned removal took effect: `shard_alike` was deleted from JAX, with "Use explicit mode as the replacement" [5].
References
- [1] Optimize `planar_snake` calculation. ↗ google/jax
- [2] Lower multi-dimensional IRFFT on GPU to a single C2R transform again ↗ google/jax
- [3] Remove dynamic discovery of unknown rocm wheels. google/jax
- [4] Regenerate lock files, notably for SciPy 1.18.1. ↗ google/jax
- [5] Delete shard_alike from JAX. Use explicit mode as the replacement: https://docs.jax.dev/en/latest/201/sharding.html ↗ google/jax
- [6] sqlalchemy-spanner: v1.20.0 ↗ googleapis/google-cloud-python
- [7] pandas-gbq: v0.35.2 ↗ googleapis/google-cloud-python
- [8] v2.20.0 ↗ googleapis/python-genai
$ ls google/week/ # the briefings behind this review