Abstract
We introduce Catalyst.jl, a flexible and feature-filled Julia library for modeling and high performance simulation of chemical reaction networks (CRNs). Catalyst acts as both a domain-specific language and an intermediate representation for symbolically encoding CRN models as Julia-native objects. This enables a pipeline of symbolically specifying, analyzing, and modifying reaction networks; converting Catalyst models to symbolic representations of concrete mathematical models; and generating compiled code for use in numerical solvers. Currently Catalyst supports conversion to symbolic discrete stochastic chemical kinetics (jump process), chemical Langevin (stochastic differential equation), and mass-action reaction rate equation (ordinary differential equation) models. Leveraging ModelingToolkit.jl and Symbolics.jl, Catalyst models can be analyzed, simplified, and compiled into optimized representations for use in a broad variety of numerical solvers. The performance of the numerical solvers Catalyst targets is illustrated across a variety of reaction networks by benchmarking stochastic simulation algorithm and ODE solver performance. We demonstrate the extendability and composability of Catalyst by highlighting both how it can compose with a variety of Julia libraries, and how existing open source projects have extended the intermediate representation. These benchmarks demonstrate significant performance improvements compared to several popular reaction network simulators.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
vilin{at}uw.edu
crackauc{at}mit.edu
