Accelereyes answers "Why software libraries are great"

1. Productive OpenCL
with Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessors and ArrayFire
by John Melonakos

2. Why Software Libraries Are Great
 Reduce many lines of code to one line
 Obsessively tuned by experts; faster than DIY
 Well-tested and maintained
 Continuously improving

3. 12 Minutes of Library Love
 Dusty servers = bad, very bad
 Software struggles lead to
under utilization
 Everyone loses

4. Five Influencers (besides price)
Portability Scalability Community
ProgrammabilityPerformance

5. Faster
Time-
consuming
SSE or
AVX
Slower
Easy-to-use
Performance & Programmability

6. Faster
Time-
consuming
Writing
Kernels
SSE or
AVX
Slower
Easy-to-use
Performance & Programmability

7. Faster
Time-
consuming
Writing
Kernels
Compiler
Directives
SSE or
AVX
Slower
Easy-to-use
Performance & Programmability

8. Faster
Time-
consuming
Writing
Kernels
Using
Libraries
Compiler
Directives
SSE or
AVX
Slower
Easy-to-use
Performance & Programmability

9. Portability
 Flavors of portability
HW options
 CPU fallback
High-performance mobile computing
 Libraries can provide portability

10. Scalability
 Always start with one device
 Potential headaches of adding devices
 Performance hit
Development complexity
 Libraries can make scaling easy

11. Community
 What do you do when bugs arise?
 Continuous refinement
 Someone to answer questions
 Libraries can have great community support

12. Benefits of Using a Library
Development
Documentation
Test and QA
Maintenance
Porting
TIME
COST
TIME
COST
ArrayFire eliminates
hidden costs of software
development
Pain Pleasure

13. Beware of Bad Libraries
 Bad libraries are a time sink
 Ruin the “library” reputation

14. Here’s One Good Library

15. Performance & Programmability
 Super easy to program
 Highly optimized

16. Portability

17. Scalability
 Multi-Device is 1-line of code
array *y = new array[n];
for (int i = 0; i < n; ++i) {
deviceset(i); // change device
array x = randu(5,5); // add work to device’s queue
y[i] = fft(x); // more work in queue
}
// all devices are now computing simultaneously

18. Community
 Over 8,000 posts at
http://forums.accelereyes.com
 Nightly library update releases
 Stable releases a few times a year
 v2.0 coming at the end of summer

19. Graphics Functions
#include <arrayfire.h>
using namespace af;
int main() {
// random 3d surface
const int n = 256;
while (1) {
array x = randu(n,n);
// 3d surface plot
surface(x);
}
return 0;
}

20. GFOR Parallel Loops
BA(,,1:3)C(,,1:3)
*=
*=
*=
gfor (array i, 3)
C(span,span,i) = A(span,span,i) * B;
Parallel matrix multiplications (1 kernel launch)

21. Software Shop for CUDA & OpenCL
 Two ways to work with us:
Use
 Hire our CUDA & OpenCL developers
Code development; CUDA & OpenCL training

22. Take Home Messages
 Free version of ArrayFire
http://accelereyes.com
 Need acceleration? Try a library!

23. Productive OpenCL
with Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessors and ArrayFire
by John Melonakos