That's right. Diesels are the perfect engines to apply forced induction to.
The engines I used to build, (piston ported 2 stroke diesel locomotive engines) actually had a gear drive on the turbocharger turbine shaft (driven by the crank) to produce boost pressure until the engine could produce enough exhaust gas flow to drive the turbo. At that point a sprag clutch, driving the turbo shaft at low speed will disengage, and the turbo would build boost based on engine load. The turbo could accelerate to speeds of 35000 rpm as compared to car turbos which tend to top out around 100,000 -110,000rpm.
Given the size of the turbines and impellers, (around 500mm) the tip speeds are enormous, compared to car applications. Internally, these turbos are the same in construction as your cars turbo; just much larger.
Another interesting thing, one brand of turbo we used had roller bearing element, (instead of plain bearings) rpm? 100,000rpm, versus 35,000 rpm. This simply allowed us to use a smaller tubo that came on boost earlier. See? Roller bearings are better...