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Julia receives DARPA award to accelerate electronics simulation

juliacomputing.com

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Re: Julia receives DARPA award to accelerate electronics simulation

#4

Post by 7_my_mind »

Is scientific computing getting some revival with the advent of quantum computers? From what I could see the niche is relatively small and not well paid, with most jobs somehow tied to the public sector. Not sure how Julia factors into all of this. I don't think the programming language makes that big of a difference, ultimately. Very interesting field at the intersection of all my skills, but I'm hesitant to get into it.

Re: Julia receives DARPA award to accelerate electronics simulation

#5

Post by d33lio »

LT-Spice is absolute trash and basically why I decided to leave EE for CS in college... among many other reasons! Essentially, because after learning all kinds of math my linear systems prof basically said "yeah, at some point you just have to simulate everything because the math you learned only applies maybe 60% of the time". Granted, I do not think I was exactly destined to be a great electrical engineer.

Electronics simulation is fascinating, especially given the AI models used to do this. Layout gets especially complex when rf-traces / layers have to be considered or when you want to have an arrangement of traces to high bandwidth components all be the same length. Interaction between multi-layer vias is also insane (the guy who built the UberTooth1 bluetooth hacking dongle has a great defcon talk on the subject).

The best analog I can come up with is the debate / discrepancies between the US and European weather simulation models. Fascinating space, I got to work a few feet away from the Julia team at the Harvard Launch Lab way back in the day at a college internship. Of the few interactions I had with their team they are great people and unbelievably brilliant. If any of you are reading this, my hat's off to your engineering abilities - I'm still impressed by the fact you guys identified an error in intel's x86 instruction sets and yeeted the issue in less than 24hrs.

Re: Julia receives DARPA award to accelerate electronics simulation

#6

Post by Trex_Egg »

7_my_mind wrote: post #4

Is scientific computing getting some revival with the advent of quantum computers? From what I could see the niche is relatively small and not well paid, with most jobs somehow tied to the public sector. Not sure how Julia factors into all of this. I don't think the programming language makes that big of a difference, ultimately. Very interesting field at the intersection of all my skills, but I'm hesitant to get int…

Just curious, what's your current works involves?

Re: Julia receives DARPA award to accelerate electronics simulation

#7

Post by prpl »

7_my_mind wrote: post #4

Is scientific computing getting some revival with the advent of quantum computers? From what I could see the niche is relatively small and not well paid, with most jobs somehow tied to the public sector. Not sure how Julia factors into all of this. I don't think the programming language makes that big of a difference, ultimately. Very interesting field at the intersection of all my skills, but I'm hesitant to get int…

There is hundreds of millions of dollars funding available at the DOE for quantum computing research, but that is spread over all aspects of quantum computing, so it’s not really enough to make significant headway anytime soon. Maybe at the $5-10B mark we could see rapid progress and start to think about scientific computing in a production context

Re: Julia receives DARPA award to accelerate electronics simulation

#8

Post by nawgz »

7_my_mind wrote: post #4

Is scientific computing getting some revival with the advent of quantum computers? From what I could see the niche is relatively small and not well paid, with most jobs somehow tied to the public sector. Not sure how Julia factors into all of this. I don't think the programming language makes that big of a difference, ultimately. Very interesting field at the intersection of all my skills, but I'm hesitant to get int…

> I don't think the programming language makes that big of a difference, ultimately

I mean, it should be clear Julia is a much higher-performance method of crunching data than Python, which is unquestionably the king of the data science pile, and therefore it factors into performance & cost.

Re: Julia receives DARPA award to accelerate electronics simulation

#9

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #3

I'm having a lot of trouble understanding how "just add AI" is going to make electronics simulation 1000x faster.

the TLDR is that for a lot of high dimensional PDE models, you get a better trade off of speed vs accuracy by using a NN for part of the model that is inefficient to calculate the full physics for. This is already having a lot of success in climate modeling, where NN based solutions do a better job of dealing with some atmospheric effects than previous efforts.
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