2.4 Julia in the Wild
In Section 2.3, we explained why we think Julia is such a unique programming language. We showed simple examples about the main features of Julia. If you would like to have a deep dive on how Julia is being used, we have some interesting use cases:
- NASA uses Julia in a supercomputer to analyze the “Largest Batch of Earth-Sized Planets Ever Found” and achieve a whopping 1,000x speedup to catalog 188 million astronomical objects in 15 minutes.
- The Climate Modeling Alliance (CliMa) is using mostly Julia to model climate in the GPU and CPU. Launched in 2018 in collaboration with researchers at Caltech, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the Naval Postgraduate School, CliMA is utilizing recent progress in computational science to develop an Earth system model that can predict droughts, heat waves, and rainfall with unprecedented precision and speed.
- US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is developing an Airborne Collision Avoidance System (ACAS-X) using Julia. This is a nice example of the “Two-Language Problem” (see Section 2.3). Previous solutions used Matlab to develop the algorithms and C++ for a fast implementation. Now, FAA is using one language to do all this: Julia.
- 175x speedup for Pfizer’s pharmacology models using GPUs in Julia. It was presented as a poster in the 11th American Conference of Pharmacometrics (ACoP11) and won a quality award.
- The Attitude and Orbit Control Subsystem (AOCS) of the Brazilian satellite Amazonia-1 is written 100% in Julia by Ronan Arraes Jardim Chagas (https://ronanarraes.com/).
- Brazil’s national development bank (BNDES) ditched a paid solution and opted for open-source Julia modeling and gained a 10x speedup.
If this is not enough, there are more case studies in JuliaHub website.
