Julia for Government

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Government agencies worldwide use Julia for research, development, econometric computations, safety, machine learning and many other compute intensive applications

Examples include aviation safety, planning space missions, central banking and cataloging all the visible objects in the night sky.

“Julia has two main advantages from our perspective. First, as free software, Julia is more accessible to users from academic institutions or organizations without the resources for purchasing a license. Now anyone, from Kathmandu to Timbuktu, can run our code at no cost.”

“Second, as the models that we use for forecasting and policy analysis grow more complicated, we need a language that can perform computations at a high speed. Julia boasts performance as fast as that of languages like C or Fortran, and is still simple to learn. We want to address hard questions with our models—from understanding financial markets developments to modeling households’ heterogeneity—and we can do so only if we are close to the frontier of programming.”

“We tested our code and found that the model estimation is about ten times faster with Julia than before, a very large improvement. Our ports (computer lingo for “translations”) of certain algorithms, such as Chris Sims’s gensys (which computes the model solution), also ran about six times faster in Julia than the … versions we had previously used.”