We are excited to announce ArrayFire v3.6.2! In this release we have fixed a number of bugs, improved documentation, and added a few features while improving performance as always. We highlight some of the exciting changes below. New features and improvements Several features added in v3.6.2 are concerned with batching and broadcasting. In v3.6 we introduced batched matmul() allowing you to multiply several matrices at the same time. You could only batch arrays that were the same shape and size on the left hand side and the right hand size. In cases when you wanted to multiply one matrix with multiple matrices, you had to tile the inputs so that they were the same shape before you performed the multiplication. …
ArrayFire v3.6 Release
Today we are pleased to announce the release of ArrayFire v3.6. It can be downloaded from these locations: Official installers GitHub repository This latest version of ArrayFire is better than ever! We added several new features that improve the performance and usability of the ArrayFire library. The main features are: Support for batched matrix multiply Added the topk function Added the anisotropic diffusion filter We have also spent a significant amount of effort improving the internals of the library. The build system is significantly improved and organized. Batched Matrix Multiplication The new batch matmul allows you to perform several matrix multiplication operations in one call of matmul. You might want to call this function if you are performing multiple smaller matrix multiplication operations. Here …
ArrayFire v3.5.1 Release
We are excited to announce ArrayFire v3.5.1! This release focuses on fixing bugs and improving performance. Here are the improvements we think are most important: Performance improvements We’ve improved element-wise operation performance for the CPU backend. The af::regions() function has been modified to leverage texture memory, improving its performance. Our JIT engine has been further optimized to boost performance. Bug fixes We’ve squashed a long standing bug in the CUDA backend responsible for breaking whenever the second, third, or fourth dimensions were large enough to exceed limits imposed by the CUDA runtime. The previous implementation of af::mean() suffered from overflows when the summation of the values lied outside the range of the backing data type. New kernels for each of …
ArrayFire v3.5 Official Release
Today we are pleased to announce the release of ArrayFire v3.5, our open source library of parallel computing functions supporting CUDA, OpenCL, and CPU devices. This new version of ArrayFire improves features and performance for applications in machine learning, computer vision, signal processing, statistics, finance, and more. This release focuses on thread-safety, support for simple sparse-dense arithmetic operations, canny edge detector function, and a genetic algorithm example. A complete list of ArrayFire v3.5 updates and new features are found in the product Release Notes. Thread Safety ArrayFire now supports threading programming models. This is not intended to improve the performance since most of the parallelism is happening on the device, but it does allow you to use multiple devices in …
Visit ArrayFire at GTC 2017
GTC is quickly approaching and we want to see you there! When: May 8-11 Where: San Jose, California ArrayFire Booth: 406 GTC is the world’s premier GPU developer conference. Connect with experts from NVIDIA and other leaders in high performance computing. At GTC you’ll discover what’s next in GPU breakthroughs and gain useful insights in hundreds of sessions and hands-on labs covering a diverse range of application domains. Attend an ArrayFire Talk We invite you to attend the following talk presented by one of our knowledgeable and experienced GPU developers. ARRAYFIRE GRAPH: DYNAMIC GRAPH LIBRARY FOR GPUS Presented by Kumar Aatish – Thursday May 11 at 9:00 am – Marriott Ballroom 3 (Session ID S7723) ArrayFire Graph is an out-of-core dynamic graph library that …
Thrombotherm: Analyzing Blood Platelets with ArrayFire
The Thrombotherm project by Catalysts is developing a method to analyze blood platelets by means of cell microscopy in real time and to classify them according to their activation state. ArrayFire enabled faster overall research project times and real-time analysis on video data. This project represents an enormous extension of thrombocyte diagnotics, especially through significantly accelerated analysis times. Faster analyses enabled university research collaborators from the University of Applied Sciences OÖ and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute to shorten research project times. The project has three main parts: Detect cell morphology in real-time Thombotherm makes it possible to mathematically determine and categorize the cell boundaries by means of transmitted light microscopy. The software distinguishes between “fried-egg”-shaped cells and “spider”-shaped cells. This is used …
ArrayFire v3.4 Official Release
Today we are pleased to announce the release of ArrayFire v3.4, our open source library of parallel computing functions supporting CUDA, OpenCL, and CPU devices. This new version of ArrayFire improves features and performance for applications in machine learning, computer vision, signal processing, statistics, finance, and more. This release focuses on 5 major components of the library that are common to many areas of mathematical, scientific, and financial computing: sparse matrix operations, random number generation, image processing, just-in-time (JIT) compilation, and visualizations. Sparse Matrix and BLAS (see blog post) Support for CSR and COO storage types Sparse-Dense Matrix Multiplication and Matrix-Vector Multiplication Conversion to and from dense matrix to CSR and COO storage types Support for Random Number Generator Engines (see blog post) Philox Threefry Mersenne Twister Image Processing (see blog post) …
Graphics Updates in ArrayFire v3.4
This post outlines the new graphics features available in ArrayFire v3.4: Vector Fields, Overlays We have added visualization support to render ArrayFire array objects as vector fields. An example of how to visualize vector fields is included in ArrayFire v3.4. A screenshot of this example’s output in multi-view mode is shown below, showcasing both static and dynamic vector field rendering. Previously, each graph (such as plot, hist, scatter, etc) was rendered in its own window (or view). Overlaying graphs was not supported. ArrayFire v3.4 now support graph overlays. Each draw call in ArrayFire is either rendered to a whole window (single view) or to a view, which is a portion of the screen obtained in multiview mode. The following image is an example of a …
Performance Improvements to JIT in ArrayFire v3.4
ArrayFire uses Just In Time compilation to combine many light weight functions into a single kernel launch. This along with our easy-to-use API allows users to not only quickly prototype their algorithms, but also get the best out of the underlying hardware. This feature has been a favorite among our users in the domains of finance and scientific simulation. That said, ArrayFire v3.3 and earlier had a few limitations. Namely: Multiple outputs with inter-dependent variables were generating multiple kernels. The number of operations per kernel was fairly limited by default. In the latest release of ArrayFire, we addressed these issues to get some pretty impressive numbers. In the rest of the post, we demonstrate the performance improvements using our BlackScholes …
Image Processing Functions in ArrayFire v3.4
There are a number of additions and updates to image based features in the new v3.4 release of ArrayFire. Among the updates are: New interpolation methods for several existing functions approx1, approx2 transform resize Functions for image moments This blog post will display some typical use cases for these new features. ArrayFire v3.4 implements several new interpolation methods for 1-d and 2-d domains. The new interpolation methods for 1-d functions are: AF_INTERP_LINEAR_COSINE AF_INTERP_CUBIC and for 2-d functions are: AF_INTERP_BILINEAR_COSINE AF_INTERP_BICUBIC The behavior of the interpolation methods can be seen in the following pictures. A common use for interpolation is image filtering. Given a coarse image, we can resample it to be smoother. af::array img = af::randu(7,7); //create a random image //define …