# Experience sharing: are julia applications limited to supercomputers?

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/experience-sharing-are-julia-applications-limited-to-supercomputers/83347>\
**Category:** New to Julia\
**Tags:** offtopic, research\
**Created:** [June 26, 2022, 4:01am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/experience-sharing-are-julia-applications-limited-to-supercomputers/83347 "2022-06-26T04:01:48Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![green](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/54ee81/32.png) [@green](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/green)\
**Post date:** [June 26, 2022, 4:01am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/experience-sharing-are-julia-applications-limited-to-supercomputers/83347/1 "2022-06-26T04:01:48Z")

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Hi,  
Most stories I heard so far from people with julia are using supercomputers.  
Has anyone experienced using julia for serious computer science research / projects with only a standard laptop or desktop computer? I would like to hear your stories and experience.

Actually I am interested in image processing, however most work on high impact publications / journals now are using deep learning models.  
Thank you very much.

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**Author:** ![Oscar\_Smith](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/oscar_smith/32/25343_2.png) [@Oscar\_Smith](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Oscar_Smith)\
**Post date:** [June 26, 2022, 4:07am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/experience-sharing-are-julia-applications-limited-to-supercomputers/83347/2 "2022-06-26T04:07:37Z")

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By far the majority of Julia work isn’t on super-computers, They are more likely to get headlines, but at a very rough estimate, well over 90% of Julia users are almost certainly on something between a laptop and a single node server. I probably wouldn’t recommend ML on a laptop (thermal issues) but that’s language agnostic.

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**Author:** ![johnh](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/johnh/32/3615_2.png) [@johnh](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/johnh)\
**Post date:** [June 26, 2022, 4:52am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/experience-sharing-are-julia-applications-limited-to-supercomputers/83347/3 "2022-06-26T04:52:13Z")

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Hello @green and welcome. I might like to field that one. I work in building supercomputers for Dell. Not much direct Julia use to be honest.  
I would call Julia ‘technical computing’ - it is a tool used by scientists and engineers. A lot of work like that is begun on laptops and deskside computers. That sort of work actually continues on laptops/desksides if they are powerful enough for the work being done. Indeed these days many companies use cloud computing to ‘scale out’ simulation work like that.  
I would say the reason you get the impression Julia is used on supercomputers mainly is that the case studies of supercomputer use are impressive - so tend to grab attention. And why not?

There also is a huge category of ‘departmental supercomputers’ which do nto make the headlines but are my bread and butter - many technical companies run their own supercomputers which are not comparable in size to national or European scale facilities but they still get useful work done.

Now I open up the conversation - what features in Julia help the scientist/engineer to migrate their codes from laptops/desksides efficiently to supercomputer clustered machines?

Also throwing a rock into the greenhouse - many workloads are embarassingly parallel. You use a single server, maybe using all the cores with threading, but you dont use the low latency fabris to compute across servers. We have servers today with easily a terabyte of RAM , 64(plus) cores and 4 or 8 GPUs. That is a lot of firepower before you even move beyond the box)

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**Author:** ![johnh](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/johnh/32/3615_2.png) [@johnh](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/johnh)\
**Post date:** [June 26, 2022, 4:53am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/experience-sharing-are-julia-applications-limited-to-supercomputers/83347/4 "2022-06-26T04:53:44Z")

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Regarding image processing look at the Nvidia Jetson range.