ArrayFire for Defense and Intelligence Applications – Joint Webinar Recap

Aaron TaylorEvents 1 Comment

In case you missed it, hundreds of attendees recently joined us in a special joint webinar with NVIDIA. The webinar was led by Kyle Spafford, a Senior Developer at AccelerEyes. Kyle detailed how GPU computing can be implemented in the defense and intelligence fields. Kyle specifically addressed enabling unique solutions for applications related to video analysis, recognition, and tracking using the ArrayFire software library for C, C++, and Fortran. At the conclusion of the presentation Kyle fields questions from those in attendance, including “How does ArrayFire Fortran Lib compare to CUDA Fortran?” (see 59:36 mark), “Can you target a specific GPU if you have multiple on the machine?” (56:14), and “How can I combine several kernels to one fat kernel by using …

Parallel Software Development Trends for Dummies

John MelonakosComputing Trends Leave a Comment

Last month, I posted two articles describing computing trends and why heterogeneous computing will be a significant force in computing for the next decade. Today, I continue that series with an article describing the biggest challenge to continued increases in computing performance – parallel software development. Biggest Challenge As I described previously, in order to use an accelerator, software changes must be made. Regular x86-based compilers cannot compile code to run on accelerators without these needed changes. The amount of software change required varies depending upon the availability of and reliance upon software tools that increase performance and productivity. There are four possible approaches to take advantage of accelerators in heterogeneous computing environments:  do-it-yourself, use compilers, use libraries, or use …

7 Highlights of GTC 2013 – Day 2 of 4

John MelonakosEvents Leave a Comment

Day 2 at GTC was high energy. The after parties are still thumping. It was a hive of GPU activity. Here are 7 of the highlights we’ve collected from our team on the second day of GTC 2013: Jen-Hsun Huang of NVIDIA gave an awesome keynote. He covered 5 topics: Computer graphics – Awesome life-like renderings of human faces (here and here) GPU computing update – 1.6 million CUDA downloads so far, tons of interesting GPU-accelerated applications (including matchmaking website fish.com, a diamond cutting company, Shazam, Cortexica, and others), roadmap update (see the next highlight) Tegra roadmap update – (see the 3rd highlight) Remote graphics update – using GPUs to render things remotely and pipe them to the monitors of …

Heterogeneous Computing Trends for Dummies

John MelonakosComputing Trends Leave a Comment

Ten days ago, I posted an article on CPU Processing Trends for Dummies. Today, I continue that series with an article describing the latest major trend in computing, namely Heterogeneous Computing. The Point The point of these articles is to paint the high-level picture for trends in computer processing. I hope this bigger picture will help summarize things for those that do not breathe computer processors and technical software on a daily basis. Over the last 20 years, big gains in computer processing have been defined by increases in CPU clock speeds, then by increases in the number of CPU cores. The next 10+ years will be defined by heterogeneous computing. Heterogeneous Computing So let’s start with a definition:  Heterogeneous …

Giddy for GTC – We’re Taking it to the Next Level

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GTC is quickly approaching and AccelerEyes is giddy with excitement! This year we are taking things to the next level as a Silver Sponsor at GTC 2013. Meaning, you’ll be seeing a lot more of us throughout the conference! Schedule a Meeting with Us Do you want to meet with us personally? Schedule a time to sit down with AccelerEyes engineers and account representatives using our online scheduler. Visit our Booth If  you’re attending GTC, be sure to come visit us at booth #204 to see some great demos or to chat with anyone in our Software Shop for CUDA & OpenCL. Come see how ArrayFire complements other GPU development efforts, including raw CUDA/OpenCL development, OpenACC, and other GPU libraries. Register …

CPU Processing Trends for Dummies

John MelonakosComputing Trends Leave a Comment

Over the years at AccelerEyes, it has been surprising to me how many people miss a big picture understanding of the trends affecting the computing industry. To help, I’m going to post a few articles with high-level explanations. I’m going to do so in a hand-wavy manner. I look forward in advance to the lively comments on my mistakes. But, in general, I think these posts will be a fairly accurate view of the important trends. Today, I’ll start by talking about CPU processing trends. Let’s start with something we all know:  CPUs are central processing units and are the main processor in the computer. You probably had to label the CPU on a diagram at some point in grade school, …

ArrayFire Examples (Part 2 of 8) – Benchmarks

ArrayFireArrayFire, Benchmarks, CUDA Leave a Comment

This is the second in a series of posts looking at our current ArrayFire examples. The code can be compiled and run from arrayfire/examples/ when you download and install the ArrayFire library. Today we will discuss the examples found in the benchmarks/ directory. In these examples, my machine has the following configuration: ArrayFire v1.9 (build XXXXXXX) by AccelerEyes (64-bit Linux) License: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX CUDA toolkit 5.0, driver 304.54 GPU0 Quadro 6000, 6144 MB, Compute 2.0 (single,double) Display Device: GPU0 Quadro 6000 Memory Usage: 5549 MB free (6144 MB total)… Blas This example shows a simple bench-marking process using ArrayFire’s matrix multiply routine. For more information on Blas, click here. The data measured in this example is the Giga-Flop (GFLOP Floating Point Operations Per Second). I got the following results using …

GTC 2013 Tutorial – CUDA Accelerated Image Processing Libraries

John MelonakosArrayFire, CUDA, Events Leave a Comment

The 2013 GPU Technology Conference is just two weeks away. We’re super excited. We’re spending a lot of time preparing for our tutorial on CUDA Accelerated Image Processing Libraries. We think it will be well worth your while to attend. This is an 80-minute share all about CUDA image processing from James Malcolm, an AccelerEyes co-founder and lead engineer. You will walk away from the tutorial much better prepared to build fast computer vision and image processing codes. The session abstract is as follows: Image processing has consistently proven to benefit greatly from GPU acceleration. A number of libraries available from NVIDIA and AccelerEyes make image processing development efficient and lead to big speedups. Using these libraries can often significantly shorten …

ArrayFire Reception in France

John MelonakosArrayFire, Case Studies, CUDA, OpenCL Leave a Comment

As an engineers company, we spend a lot of time wrestling in the weeds of low-level GPU and accelerator codes. This is our battleground, and it can often be dizzying in its complexity. Our whole purpose is to hide that mess and tame those low-level beasts so that ArrayFire users get better performance than anyone else. The joy of ArrayFire comes when we get feedback from ArrayFire users, often from different parts of the world. For instance, the week I share excerpts from two recent emails we received in France: 1) From Barep, a French manufacturing company:  “I think ArrayFire is a ‘must have’ library. It’s very easy to use and can be used under Linux and Windows. Personally, I’m happy …

Getting Started with ArrayFire – a 30-minute Jump Start

ArrayFireArrayFire, C/C++, CUDA, OpenCL 1 Comment

In case you missed it, we recently held a webinar on the ArrayFire GPU Computing Library. This webinar was part of an ongoing series of webinars that will help you learn more about the many applications of ArrayFire, while interacting with AccelerEyes GPU computing experts. ArrayFire is the world’s most comprehensive GPU software library. In this webinar, James Malcolm, who has built many of ArrayFire’s core components, walked us through the basic principles and syntax for ArrayFire. He also provided an overview of existing efforts in GPU software, and compared them to the extensive capabilities of ArrayFire. For example, the same application that takes 26 lines to write in Thrust, can be coded up in just 3 lines in ArrayFire! ArrayFire has supported …