We are excited to report a great kickoff to 2022 with this quick list of notable ArrayFire developments underway. ArrayFire v3.8.1 Release We recently announced ArrayFire v3.8.1, available on Github (source) and on our download page (binaries). Flashlight Project for Machine Learning The open source Flashlight project from Facebook is growing rapidly. In a single repository, Flashlight provides apps for research across multiple domains: Automatic speech recognition Image classification Object detection Language modeling Flashlight builds atop ArrayFire as the tensor library for GPU and CPU training. Parallel Universe Magazine ArrayFire was recently featured in Intel’s Parallel Universe Magazine. Check out the article entitled, “ArrayFire Interoperability with oneAPI, Libraries, and OpenCL Code.” This article explains how, with minor code changes, whole OpenCL libraries …
Dissipative Dynamics at Conical Intersections
Researchers from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore presented results from simulations achieved with ArrayFire in the Faraday Discussions journal of The Royal Society of Chemistry. The simulations model the effects of a dissipative environment on the ultrafast vibronic couplings at conical intersections. In this post, we first define these terms to gain understanding. Subsequently, we provide a summary of this research and the utility provided by ArrayFire in the simulation framework. Defining Terms Dissipative Environment (ref1, ref2) A dissipative system is a thermodynamically open system that is operating out of, and often far from, thermodynamic equilibrium in an environment with which it exchanges energy and matter. A tornado may be thought of as a dissipative system. Dissipative systems stand in …
Dynamical Properties of a Nonlinear Growth Equation with ArrayFire
Researchers at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne in France and the University of Miskolc in Hungary use ArrayFire in the analysis and study of the dynamical properties of a nonlinear growth equation, as described in this paper. Oftentimes, technical computing problems are simply intractable on CPUs and bigger devices like GPUs are required in order to get the job done. In this case, ArrayFire was an easy-to-use option for these researchers to build and analyze math quickly and efficiently on the GPU. From their abstract: “The conserved Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation is considered as the evolution equation of amorphous thin film growth in one- and in two-dimensions. The role of the nonlinear term and the properties of the solutions are investigated …
Synthetic Aperture Radar on the Jetson TX1
Researchers at Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University have implemented a synthetic aperture radar processing on the Jetson TX1 Platform using ArrayFire as described in this paper. The paper introduces SAR as “a remote sensing technique producing high-resolution radar images of the Earth’s surface. SAR technology allows obtaining wide swath radar images of objects at a considerable distance regardless of the weather and lighting conditions. It can be used by unmanned aerial vehicles and space satellites. Thus, SAR technology allows solving various problems, such as: detecting small objects (vehicles, airplanes, ships), assessing the state of railways, airfields, seaports, mapping an area, assisting in geological exploration, mapping vegetation, detecting oil spills and pollution as well as many other tasks.” The …
CUDA Computing on Google Colab with ArrayFire
For the first-time in our 14 year existence, we are now able to provide our community with the ability to run ArrayFire programs for free within minutes. Before today, users would have to download and install the library on their own systems, which can be a hassle if you just want to play around with some code and benchmarks. Today, we’re excited to announce that ArrayFire is available on Google Colab, the free GPU computing cloud service from Google. Colaboratory, or “Colab” for short, allows you to write and execute Python in your browser, with Zero configuration required, free access to GPUs, and easy sharing. You can jump right in and start playing with this new tool: Click Here to …
Finger Vein Identity Recognition in “Negligible Time” using ArrayFire
In this blog post, we summarize work by researchers in Slovakia using ArrayFire to develop OpenFinger, a finger vein identity recognition library. Finger prints and finger veins can be used as a biometric for identity recognition. The physical setup of their sensor system is the following collection of CMOS sensors scattering light to a near infrared LED that projects the image to a CCD camera for capture to a computer. The computing infrastructure used in this work consists of the following components. Several great open source libraries are used, including OpenCV, Caffe, Qt, and ArrayFire. ArrayFire is specifically used in pre-processing to accelerate Gabor filtering on the GPU. Gabor filter has proven itself as one of the most suitable techniques …
Bringing Together the GPU Computing Ecosystem for Python
To date, we have not done a lot for the Python ecosystem. A few months ago, we decided it was time to change that. Like NVIDIA said in this post, the current slate of GPU tools available to Python developers is scattered. With some attention to community building, perhaps we can build something better — together. NVIDIA spoke some about its plans to help cleanup the ecosystem. We’re onboard with that mentality and have two ways we propose to contribute: We’re working on a survey paper that assesses the state of the ecosystem. What technical computing things can you do with each package? What benchmarks result from the packages on real Python user code? What plans does each group have …
Schrödinger’s Smoke in Unity with ArrayFire
Researchers in Russia used ArrayFire to achieve impressive results modeling Eulerian incompressible fluids in the Unity game engine. The team developed a solution that allows us to simulate particle systems with high physical accuracy using ArrayFire. The solution makes it possible to simulate the interaction of two vortex rings—their collisions and intersections. The particle system is a method used in computer graphics and interactive simulations to represent objects that do not have clear geometric boundaries. This makes it possible to create practically any type of natural effects—e.g., explosions, jets of steam, nebulae, rain, snow, water splashes, fire smoke, etc. The particle system controls groups of particles—that is, small flat images or mesh objects. Any particle has a certain ‘lifetime’ (usually …
ArrayFire v3.8 Release
We are excited to share the v3.8 release of ArrayFire! ArrayFire is used in commercial, academic, and government projects around the world, solving some of the toughest computing problems in the most innovative projects. It is well-tested and amazingly fast! In this post, we share some of the major features added to ArrayFire in its 3.8 feature release. The binaries and source code can be downloaded from these locations: Official installers GitHub repository Official APT repository Starting with this release, we will provide Ubuntu packages form our APT repository. To install our packages add our apt repository with the below commands. At this moment we are only supporting bionic(18.04) and focal(20.04). apt-key adv –fetch-key https://repo.arrayfire.com/GPG-PUB-KEY-ARRAYFIRE-2020.PUB echo “deb [arch=amd64] https://repo.arrayfire.com/ubuntu $(lsb_release …
The Roaring 20s in AI & Technical Computing
Since ArrayFire was founded in 2007, there has been an explosion in software and its importance to our lives. Computers, connected to sensors and real-world outcomes, do really cool things that touch nearly every aspect of our lives. I believe these are exciting times for technical computing and for HPC, as evidenced by the things showcased this week at SC 2020. While ArrayFire focuses purely on software, our hardware partners turn our imaginative lines of code into real-world applications. AMD, NVIDIA, and Intel have each evolved tremendously since we started ArrayFire. Over a decade ago, NVIDIA and its CEO-founder Jensen saw the opportunity to teach the world a new heterogeneous model of computing that overwhelmingly convinces scientists, engineers, and analysts …