The ArrayFire library attempts to make high-performance computing as easy as possible for scientists and engineers. Because many tasks need to be visualized, ArrayFire also provides a high-level interface to our Forge visualization library. In today’s “Learning ArrayFire from scratch” post we present an overview of ArrayFire’s visualization functionality and demonstrate how to use Forge to display data contained in af::array objects.
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-OpenGL Interop using CUDA
A lot of ArrayFire users have been interested in the usage of ArrayFire in partnership with OpenGL for graphics computation. In the long run, we do plan to expand further on the interoperablilty and make it easier through ArrayFire. For now, we have developed a small example to expand on the usage of the CUDA-OpenGL interop API to assist in the interop operations between ArrayFire and OpenGL. Some of the advantage of direct ArrayFire-OpenGL interop are: Faster data transfers: Since the OpenGL buffers as well as ArrayFire data reside on the GPU, we can use a direct device to device copy rather than using the CPU as an intermediate and the relatively slow PCIe interface. Offscreen rendering: It is commonly …