I've seen it used for large-scale genomics. Saving a few bits if you're dealing with billions of a thing is very useful. They're also vital for being able to pa

I've seen it used for large-scale genomics. Saving a few bits if you're dealing with billions of a thing is very useful. They're also vital for being able to pack as much of a datastructure (e.g. a graph) on a single node. Some graph algorithms, e.g. random walks, are latency bound and scale really badly in a distributed system.