ArrayFire, a GPU library, is now open source

[Shehzan via Digitalmars-d-announce]

> Am I the only one to be left completely cold with the new wave 
> of C++ to GPU libraries (Bolt/ArrayFire/OpenACC) which take 
> back the control compute APIs give? For example this one 
> removes double precision and multiple devices, something that 
> is builtin with OpenCL.
>
> These libraries build on the myth that GPU's power can be 
> harnessed without pain, but at one point you have to expose the 
> multiple levels of parallelism that GPU have, use spatial cache 
> locality, etc. This is like, a 60% solution.

I am one of the developers of ArrayFire. As we went open source, 
we removed all restrictions that were put in place for our older 
commercial version. That is, double precision and multiple device 
are are part of the open source project.

We also support CPU and OpenCL backends along with CUDA. This 
way, you can use the same ArrayFire code to run across any of 
those technologies without changes. All you need to do is link 
the correct library.

We used a BSD 3-Clause license to make it easy for everyone to 
use in their own projects.

Here is a blog I made about implementing Conway's Game of Life 
using ArrayFire 
http://arrayfire.com/conways-game-of-life-using-arrayfire/. It 
demonstrates how easy it is to use ArrayFire.

Our goal is to make it easy for people to get started with GPU 
programming and break down the barrier for non-programmers to use 
the hardware efficiently. I agree that complex algorithms require 
more custom solutions, but once you get started, things become 
much easier.