News for the accelerated computing community – June 27, 2022 Signup for Newsletter Emails Dear Friends, Welcome to the first newsletter for our ArrayFire community! This newsletter brings together people using and developing ArrayFire and other accelerated computing tools. You are part of this vibrant group that “gathers” together around open source work, including: You are distinguished professionals in your domains, and we hope to build more opportunities for you to interact with the ArrayFire team and one another. We will start with this lightweight quarterly newsletter. At a glance, you’ll be able to see recent developments as well as upcoming opportunities. Enjoy! -John Melonakos, CEO & Co-Founder Product Releases ArrayFire v3.8.2 was released on May 19, 2022. Read more …
An Exact and Fast Computation of the Discrete Fourier Transform for Polar and Spherical Grid
Researchers from the University of Central Florida credit ArrayFire in a paper published in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing. The paper is titled “An Exact and Fast Computation of Discrete Fourier Transform for Polar and Spherical Grid” and provides the first exact and fast solution to the problem of obtaining discrete Fourier transform for polar and spherical grids. This paper is fully reproducible on Github. Summary Numerous applied problems of two-dimensional (2-D) and 3-D imaging are formulated in the continuous domain. They emphasize obtaining and manipulating the Fourier transform in polar and spherical coordinates. However, translating continuum ideas with discretely sampled data on a Cartesian grid is problematic. There exists no exact and fast solution to the problem of obtaining discrete Fourier …
Accelerated NSGA-2 for Multi-Objective Optimization Problems
Researchers from the Catalan Telecommunications Technology Centre in Spain credit ArrayFire in a paper published in the Applied Soft Computing Journal. The paper is titled “A GPU fully vectorized approach to accelerate performance of NSGA-2 based on stochastic non-domination sorting and grid-crowding” and showcases ArrayFire accelerating decision space exploration for multi-objective optimization problems. Summary This work introduces an accelerated implementation of NSGA-2 on a graphics processing unit (GPU) to reduce execution time. Parallelism is achieved at the population level using vectorization. All the algorithm components are run on the device, minimizing communication overhead. New stochastic versions of both non-domination sorting and crowding are introduced in the article. They are designed to be efficiently vectorized on GPU; therefore, the proposed approach is finally …
Topology Optimization with Accessibility Constraint for Multi-Axis Machining
Researchers from the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) credit ArrayFire in a paper published in the Journal of Computer-Aided Design. The paper is titled “Topology Optimization with Accessibility Constraint for Multi-Axis Machining” and showcases ArrayFire accelerating the workload. Summary In this post, a topology optimization (TO) framework is presented to enable the automated design of mechanical components while ensuring the result can be manufactured using multi-axis machining. Although TO improves the part’s performance, the as-designed model is often geometrically too complex to be machined, and the as-manufactured model can significantly vary due to machining constraints that are not accounted for during TO. In other words, many of the optimized design features cannot be accessed by a machine tool without colliding with the …
Autonomous Air Refueling Path Planning for UAVs with ArrayFire
Researchers from the Aeronautics and Space Technologies Institute of the Turkish Air Force Academy credit ArrayFire in a paper published in the Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems. The paper is titled “Sigmoid Limiting Functions and Potential Field Based Autonomous Air Refueling Path Planning for UAVs” and showcases ArrayFire in a real-time application of UAV path planning. Summary This paper builds on previous approaches for autonomous air-refueling (AAR) path planning for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Deficiencies from previous approaches, like smooth maneuvers in the tanker approach and the boundary functions of the potential zones, have been handled. Furthermore, special pattern parameters are added to the approach which makes it suitable for different kind of UAVs that has variable flight speed and turn …
ArrayFire v3.8.2 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. CUDA Version Updates We have also improved the compatibility of the ArrayFire library to the latest CUDA toolkits and improved the build process and added additional build configurations so that you can customize the library for your specific application. Better Linux Experience We have updated the Debian and Ubuntu installers to reduce the binary size and reduced the setup process for the users. You can now download the ArrayFire library using the following commands on a Debian/Ubuntu system. apt-key adv –fetch-key https://repo.arrayfire.com/GPG-PUB-KEY-ARRAYFIRE-2020.PUB echo …
Classification of Topological Discrepancies in 3D Printing with ArrayFire
Researchers from the Palo Alto Research Center in California credit ArrayFire in a paper published in the Journal of Computer-Aided Design. The paper is titled “A Classification of Topological Discrepancies in Additive Manufacturing” and showcases a novel approach for classification of local shape deviations in topological terms than can be used to improve 3D printing processes. The OpenCL version of ArrayFire on an NVIDIA GTX 1080 GPU was used for FFT-based convolutions and superlevel set operations. A design’s manufacturability via an additive manufacturing (AM) process is largely determined by the AM machine’s ability to print the shape within ‘acceptable limits’. The notion of geometric dimensioning and tolerancing has been used successfully to define and check these limits for conventionally manufactured …
Call for ArrayFire User Stories
There’s a sweet ArrayFire T-Shirt for anyone that submits a write-up of your success with the ArrayFire library. We’ve been working on a new website for our community, and we’d love to hear what you’re doing with the library. Also, your stories are important to the ArrayFire open source project in that we share them with project funders to motivate their continued investment in our community and library development. Please take some time to help us by sharing your success. We recognize that most people are not constantly focused on performance improvement. Most of you have ArrayFire in your toolbelt to accelerate code when your application demands excellent performance. If you have found it helpful in a project, please consider …
Checkpoint and Restore Emacs into Immortality
TL;DR. An Emacs death is horrible to endure. Checkpoint Emacs’ state at regular intervals to bring it back to life with CRIU. Yup, CRIU can handle Emacs, now! The steps, nowadays, are simple and this post quickly outlines the constraints and the commands to make it work. This post is short and to the point. The build choices, configurations, etc. have been stripped again and again to make things as simple as possible. Also, these instructions are given for a recent Ubuntu in order to be more canonical 😄 Make a Place for bins at ~/.bin Grab an Emacs without DBUS Grab CRIU Configure Emacs Your immortal Emacs will be in daemon mode and will talk with emacsclients over a …
Improved Interpretation of Pneumonia Malformation in Chest X-Rays with ArrayFire
Researchers from the University of Calcutta in India credit ArrayFire in a paper published in the Applied Soft Computing Journal. The paper is titled “Chest X-ray enhancement to interpret pneumonia malformation based on fuzzy soft set and Dempster–Shafer theory of evidence” and showcases an algorithm that is qualitatively and quantitatively improved in both accuracy and execution time over other common methods used in X-ray enhancement. Research Summary The details of the algorithm development are described in the paper. Figure 1 below shows the basic structure of the algorithm: the separate processing of the original image and its complement, the use of fussy soft sets, the use of Dempster-Shafer theory, and the ultimate creation of the enhanced image. The results of …