Surge

What is Surge?

Surge is a Swift library that uses the Accelerate framework to provide high-performance functions for matrix math, digital signal processing, and image manipulation.

Accelerate exposes SIMD instructions available in modern CPUs to significantly improve performance of certain calculations. Because of its relative obscurity and inconvenient APIs, Accelerate is not commonly used by developers, which is a shame, since many applications could benefit from these performance optimizations.

Surge aims to bring Accelerate to the mainstream, making it as easy (and nearly as fast, in most cases) to perform computation over a set of numbers as for a single member.

Though, keep in mind: Accelerate is not a silver bullet. Under certain conditions, such as performing simple calculations over a small data set, Accelerate can be out-performed by conventional algorithms. Always benchmark to determine the performance characteristics of each potential approach.

Overview