Intel Acquires The Team Behind ArrayFire GPU Acceleration / Parallel Computing Software

In addition to Intel acquiring Linutronix as the company known for their work on the real-time (RT) kernel patches and other contributions and then back in June acquiring Codeplay Software, Intel has today made another notable software talent acquisition... Intel announced this afternoon that the team behind ArrayFire has joined the company to further their ambitious software endeavors.

Intel acquired Codeplay this summer to bolster their oneAPI software effort given the company's work on SYCL computing, oneAPI support for NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, and a variety of other interesting efforts over the years. Intel pulling over the entire ArrayFire software team is along similar lines and aims to further bolster their oneAPI ecosystem.

ArrayFire for those unfamiliar with them provide various parallel computing and GPU compute software. The ArrayFire software provides a GPGPU extension for C / C++ / Fortran that works across various accelerators from multiple vendors as well as CPU-based execution. ArrayFire has been funded in part by DARPA and reportedly has various defense industry customer usage. ArrayFire has been an open-source library now for over a half-decade while they also provide OpenCL and NVIDIA CUDA consulting services.

Intel announced that the ArrayFire team has joined Intel to specifically focus on oneAPI:

At ArrayFire, this team pioneered productive approaches to accelerated computing. They created the ArrayFire library with fast, easy-to-use math routines resting on an ingenious runtime that optimizes low-level performance details through clever JIT compilation of kernel code and intelligent memory management.

Because oneAPI is a foundational effort to ensure accelerated computing is open, multivendor, and multiarchitecture; the teams instantly knew we were kindred spirits.

With their pioneering track record and demonstrated skill at bringing open solutions to accelerated computing, we are all excited at the opportunity to join forces in helping make open accelerated computing a reality for everyone.
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This team at Intel is now building a oneAPI backend allowing library users to migrate to oneAPI. This exciting work will further promote our vision for open accelerated technical computing.

ArrayFire today as well announced it and summed it up as "our open-source team has joined Intel to focus on building an open future for accelerated computing with oneAPI. At Intel, we will build towards a vision that flourishes at scale, serves domain professionals worldwide, and participates in the exciting oneAPI ecosystem of open-source technical computing."

Details of this deal were not publicly disclosed. Intel hasn't said that they outright acquired ArrayFire while both announcements cite the "team" has joined Intel. Intel's announcement also confirmed that John Melonakos, CEO & Co-Founder of ArrayFire, is now at Intel. Based on ArrayFire's announcement, it seems their consulting and training services will continue in their own path.

Intel's oneAPI work has been extremely promising along with their open-source projects at large over the years. It will be very interesting to see how this all pans out with their very exciting software talent pool additions this year from Codeplay to ArrayFire.