Boston, MA – Less than two weeks after Julia 1.0 was released, China has for the first time become the number one country for downloads of the Julia programming language. This highlights the broad international appeal of Julia for artificial intelligence, machine learning, numerical and scientific computing.

Julia is a free and open source computer programming language that delivers the speed of C++ and Java together with the high-level productivity, simplicity and ease of use of Python and R.

The August 2018 release of Julia 1.0 is the most important Julia milestone since Julia was launched in Feb 2012 by computer scientists Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski, Viral Shah and MIT professor Alan Edelman.

Since the release of Julia 1.0, 34% of unique visitors to the Julia download page are from China, 22% are from the United States, 5% are from Japan, 4% are from Germany and 3% are from the United Kingdom. Julia has been downloaded in more than 140 countries during the past two weeks.

Professor Alan Edelman explained: “Since we first launched Julia six and a half years ago, Julia has reached more than 2 million downloads and early adopters have already put Julia into production to power self-driving cars, robots, 3D printers and applications in precision medicine, augmented reality, genomics, energy trading, machine learning, financial risk management and space mission planning. The future belongs to artificial intelligence and machine learning, and that future is powered by Julia.”

• Julia users, partners and employers hiring Julia programmers include Amazon, Apple, BlackRock, Booz Allen Hamilton, Capital One, Comcast, Disney, Ernst & Young, Facebook, Federal Aviation Administration, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Ford, Google, IBM, Intel, KPMG, Microsoft, NASA, Oracle, PwC and Uber.

• Julia is used at more than 700 universities, research laboratories and research institutions worldwide including MIT, UC Berkeley, Harvard, Stanford, University of Chicago, Caltech, Carnegie Mellon, Cambridge, Oxford, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Alan Turing Institute, Max Planck Institute, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Ames Laboratory and Barts Cancer Institute.

• Julia is free and open source with a large and growing community of more than 700 contributors, 2 million downloads, 1,900 packages, 41 thousand GitHub stars (cumulative for Julia language and Julia packages) and +101% annual download growth

• Julia combines the high-level productivity and ease of use of Python and R with the lightning-fast speed of C++

• Julia is the only high-level dynamic language that has run at petascale

• Julia leveraged 650,000 cores and 1.3 million threads on 9,300 Knights Landing (KNL) nodes to catalog 188 million astronomical objects in just 14.6 minutes using the world’s sixth most powerful supercomputer

• Julia provides speed and performance improvements of 1,000x or more for applications such as insurance risk modeling and astronomical image analysis

• Julia delivers vast improvements in speed and performance on a wide range of architectures from a single laptop to the world’s sixth most powerful supercomputer, and from one node to thousands of nodes including multithreading, GPU and parallel computing capabilities

• Julia powers the Federal Aviation Administration’s NextGen Aircraft Collision Avoidance System (ACAS-X), BlackRock’s trademark Aladdin analytics platform and the New York Federal Reserve Bank’s Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) macroeconomic model

• Julia Computing was founded in 2015 by all of the co-creators of Julia to provide Julia users with Julia products, Julia training, and Julia support. Julia Computing is headquartered in Boston with offices in London and Bangalore