Today we are pleased to announce the release of ArrayFire v3.0. This new version features major changes to ArrayFire’s visualization library, a new CPU backend, and dense linear algebra for OpenCL devices. It also includes improvements across the board for ArrayFire’s OpenCL backend. A complete list ArrayFire v3.0 updates and new features can be found in the product Release Notes. With over 8 years of continuous development, the open source ArrayFire library is the top CUDA and OpenCL software library. ArrayFire supports CUDA-capable GPUs, OpenCL devices, and other accelerators. With its easy-to-use API, this hardware-neutral software library is designed for maximum speed without the hassle of writing time-consuming CUDA and OpenCL device code. With ArrayFire’s library functions, developers can maximize …
ArrayFire Open Source Buzz
Over the weekend we celebrated the month-iversary of ArrayFire going open source. A month later, we’re still pumped about this move, and the response from the parallel computing community has been tremendous. We thought we’d share some of our favorite ArrayFire buzz from the last month. On the day of the release, we watched as the ArrayFire open source release steadily climbed up Hacker News, eventually landing the number three spot! Admittedly, it’s hard to compete with a comet landing. With eager eyes, we followed the rise of our GitHub repository’s star count to an incredible 860 stars. We received shout-outs from several major blogs including Phoronix, insideHPC, and HPCWire. In the AMD Developer Blog, Brent Hollingsworth wrote “On the AMD side, we have been very impressed …
Getting Started with the Intel Xeon Phi on Ubuntu 14.04/Linux Kernel 3.13.0
You may already know that the Intel MPSS (Manycore Platform Software Stack) officially only supports the RedHat and SUSE Linux distros. Using an enterprise distro might be very interesting if your company is running a large server environment or short on specialized people and you rely on the distro official support for more complicated tasks. Not all companies use enterprise Linux distributions. Ubuntu has a large share of the Linux distro market (if not the largest). A while back, I needed to setup a machine running Ubuntu 14.04 and MPSS 3.4.x and could not find any documentation running the newest versions of Ubuntu/Linux Kernel/MPSS. In this blog, I will try to document how to get the Intel Xeon Phi running …
Conway’s Game of Life using ArrayFire
Conway’s Game of Life is a popular zero player cellular automaton devised by the John Horton Conway in 1970. The game makes for a fun evolution as the player sets the initial condition and then observes the evolution of the game. Each cell has 2 states: live or dead. There are 4 simple rules that determine this: Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by under-population. Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation. Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction. From a programmer’s …
ArrayFire is Now Open Source
Yes, you read that right! ArrayFire is open source—it’s all there and it’s all free. This is big, and you and the rest of the parallel computing community are going to love it! You can download our pre-compiled binary installers which are optimized for a wide variety of systems or you can get a copy of the ArrayFire source code from our GitHub page. ArrayFire is being released under the BSD 3-Clause License, which will enable unencumbered deployment and portability of ArrayFire for commercial use. So go check it out! We welcome your feedback and look forward to your future contributions to ArrayFire. The move to open source isn’t our only news—we’ve also made ArrayFire better than ever. Check out our recent …
Domain Expertise Vs. Compilers
Every so often people come up to us and ask, “Aren’t compilers and compiler directives good enough for HPC applications?” or “Won’t a compiler accomplish that for us?” While compilers have made massive progress in the last two decades, they are still nowhere near the point of putting us and many other HPC programmers out of business. Compilers are still a “one-size-fits-all” solution that needs to be able to deal with any and all input, whereas HPC programmers can be thought of as a designer-fitted solution. Application expertise brings a lot to the table that compilers cannot compete with: Our past experiences have helped us optimize applications that have irregular memory access patterns. While some applications such as matrix applications have regular and simple …
Open Source Initiatives from ArrayFire
At ArrayFire we like to use a lot of Free/Open Source software. We use various Linux distributions, Jenkins, Gitlab, gcc, emacs, vim and numerous other FOSS tools on a daily basis. We also love the idea of developing software collaboratively and openly. Last year we started working with AMD on CL Math Libraries. Internally we’ve had numerous discussions about contributing to the GPGPU community. However, it’s neither simple nor straightforward to take a closed software Open Source. Earlier this year, we decided to take the first step and Open Source all of the ArrayFire library’s tertiary projects. This includes all of our ArrayFire library’s language wrappers, examples, and source code used for our blog posts. All of our projects are hosted at our …
How to Make GPU Hardware Decisions
We get questions all the time about how to make GPU hardware decisions. We’ve seen just about every scenario you can imagine, and so we always jump at the chance to help others through this decision process. Here’s a recent question from a customer. “I’ve just found your post on Analytic Bridge and have taken a look at your website … I’m replacing my two Tesla M1060 cards (computing capability too low) and I’m considering used Tesla M2070s or the new GTX 760 cards. Could you offer any insight? I believe the GTX 760 cards may well outperform the older 2070s and are much cheaper.” And here’s our response. “The GTX 760 will probably outperform the M2070 for single precision …
GitLab at ArrayFire
Until recently, we had our central git repositories hosted on a virtual machine. This was running on a big, noisy, rack mounted server. We started thinking about cutting down the number of machines we use on a daily basis (Just can’t stop optimizing). The opportunity popped up during an office move to our new location. We had discussed this idea in a few meetings before, but for various reasons, they were not acted upon. During the move Umar started hacking on GitLab to get it working for us internally. The office move came as a blessing in disguise. He used one of our old Dell Inspiron laptops that was just gathering dust. We ordered new DDR2 (yes, DDR2) RAM for it and installed …
APU 2013 – Day 3 Recap
Big announcement here at #APU13! AMD CTO, Mark Papermaster, just announced 2 additions to the 2014 Mobile APU roadmap http://t.co/sWHMhb9AAe — AMD (@AMD) November 13, 2013 Today was the final day of AMD’s APU 2013 conference. The theme of today was mostly focused on gaming topics, so it was not as relevant to technical computing as yesterday. However, the mobile product announcement from AMD in the tweet above was interesting. OpenCL is just as important in mobile computing as it is in HPC computing. Both ends of the spectrum have a need for speed and can achieve it through great data parallelism. AMD is looking to make better inroads into mobile computing with these APU announcements. Overall, APU 2013 was a fantastic …