(This is a guest post by Gustavo Stahl from São Paulo State University in Brazil.) Summary Corners present in images are widely used in multiple areas of computer science, such as augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, service robots, 3D reconstructions, object tracking, and many more. To work appropriately, applications in these areas usually rely on fast corner detectors with good-quality extractions. The FOAGDD (First-order Anisotropic Gaussian Direction Derivative) is an algorithmic technique for extracting corners in an image originally proposed by Weichuan Zhang and Changming Sun in 2019. The method surpassed the majority of extractors in corner detection quality but lacked speed, making it improper for real-time applications. Hence, this paper proposes transferring the workload from the original implementation to the …
The Torch By ArrayFire: Q1’2023 GPU Updates
News for the accelerated computing community – March 23, 2023 Signup for Newsletter Emails Dear ArrayFire Community, The first quarter of 2023 was highlighted by substantial progress on the oneAPI backend for ArrayFire. Updates on this project can be tracked on the ArrayFire Github. With the explosion of AI throughout technical computing domains, we are working closely with the teams at Facebook AI Research (FAIR) working on the Flashlight and Shumai projects. We share a project spotlight on Shumai below. From interactions with many of you and reading papers published using ArrayFire, we are delighted to see our work be used to make a difference in meaningful technical computing projects. If you want to showcase your project in this newsletter, please …
How does a Quantum Computer work?
This is the third post in a series on quantum computing, which began with the following: By design, a quantum computer is a device that executes quantum computations. These quantum computations utilize quantum mechanical principles to encode and operate on inputs and outputs. There are two main types of quantum computers based on the data unit: discrete-based and continuous-based. Discrete-based quantum computers use a discrete unit of data with quantum properties; most use qubits on which operations are performed. In contrast, continuous-based quantum computers utilize observable quantities with continuous intervals to define the system’s state. We will focus on discrete/digital quantum systems as this is the most common model for which many algorithms have already been developed. Like classical computers, …
Quantum States vs Classical States
In the last post of this series, we discussed how supercharging quantum computing with Quantum Mechanics’ principles allows high computational power. To come to terms with this, we must first delve into the math behind quantum memory. A computer needs memory. It stores input and output data as a transitional place to operate on data. We care about this functionality because data encodes states. In the classical sense, a state refers to the particular arrangement that something is in at a specific moment. Examples of a classical state are the position of a door: either open or closed; the color of a marker: red, blue, yellow, etc.; the value of a bit: 0 or 1 / false or true; and …
What is a Quantum Computer?
Quantum computing has been a growing area of computer science over the last few years. Thanks to leaps in material engineering, physics, and noise reduction algorithms, the possibility of constructing a fully-fledged quantum computer in the future grows nearer. Like the computers we use daily, a quantum computer is a machine that can perform computations with given data. However, unlike classical computers, they are characterized by using Quantum Mechanical Principles in the data storage and logic of those computations. Among some of these novel Quantum Mechanical properties, these are the keys ones: Even if Quantum Computers have many advantages, including possibly being faster, are classical computers insufficient? As innovation in new technologies grows in fields such as finance, medicine, and …
ArrayFire v3.8.3 Release
We are pleased to announce another patch release of the ArrayFire library. This release, like all patch releases, concentrates on bug fixes and minor performance improvements. You can access the new version here: installers and source code. Notable improvements include: Additionally, several bugs have been patched. Visit our GitHub project for more information on the ArrayFire Roadmap. It has never been easier to use the ArrayFire library. With your support, we continue to push the limits of all the accelerators coming to the market. Is there a project where you think we can help? Please reach out to our expert engineers to help you take your project to the next level.
Detecting Anomalies of Large-Scale Light Curves
Researchers from Tsinghua University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and David Bader of the New Jersey Institute of Technology credit ArrayFire in a paper published in the 2020 IEEE High-Performance Extreme Computing Conference (HPEC). The paper is titled “GPU Accelerated Anomaly Detection of Large Scale Light Curves.” In this research, light from 200,000 stars is tracked, looking for events of high-mass dark objects that bend light from the source, indicating the discovery of planets and black holes. Summary Microlensing is a unique anomaly that occurs when a lens (or lenses) passes between a light source (star) and an observer (Earth). These lenses are high-mass objects that bend the light from the source. This anomaly is helpful in the detection of “dark” objects. …
The Torch By ArrayFire: Q4’2022 GPU Updates
News for the accelerated computing community – November 2, 2022 Signup for Newsletter Emails Dear ArrayFire Community, Last quarter was highlighted by the significant announcement that our team has joined Intel Corporation to deliver on a shared vision of open-source accelerated computing with oneAPI. The ArrayFire open-source project will continue to follow The ArrayFire Mission. It will be governed by its maintainers sponsored by various companies, including Google, Twitter, VoltronData, and now Intel. ArrayFire’s support for CUDA, OpenCL, and x86 will continue unchanged. We are also excited to announce that our consulting and training services team is expanding its offering in partnership with OpenTeams, a leading provider of technology and talent to support companies backed by innovative open-source communities like ours. This quarterly newsletter brings together …
Simulating Soliton Excitations in Open Systems
Researchers from the University Bordeaux credit ArrayFire in a paper published in a Master’s Thesis by André Almeida. The thesis is titled “Soliton Excitations in Open Systems using GPGPU Supercomputing.” It investigates the stability of nonlinear excitations in open optical systems modeled by the Complex Ginzburg Landau Equation when influenced by effects such as dissipation and gain, using numerical simulations. Summary In the early years of the 19th century the naval engineer James Scott Russell made the first observation of a very uniform accumulation of water in a boat canal that was capable to propagate for many kilometers without any losses in amplitude and with constant width. This was a very strange phenomenon at the time because no known description of hydrodynamics …
Linguistic AI with RWS Language Weaver
Guest post by William Tambellini of RWS Language Weaver. This post shows how RWS Language Weaver, a comprehensive and adaptable neural machine translation platform, uses ArrayFire to run AI algorithms at scale. Language Weaver provides secure enterprise machine translation solutions adapted to client content – empowering you to communicate without language barriers. Language is often a barrier to clear communication with internal and external stakeholders. For governments, Language Weaver brings a global perspective into an analytics pipeline integrating with content intelligence applications to minimize the effort required to translate multilingual content. For global enterprises, Language Weaver can help you improve collaboration between teams, increase productivity, and go to market faster internationally. For legal and compliance teams, Language Weaver manages multilingual …