Is it possible to access arrayfire's data memory using CPU backend without data copy?

Question

I wanna use arrayfire in CPU mode (mkl) only to be able to access data without transmission, as it may happen for GPU data.

Is there a way to have direct access to arrayfire's data memory (only CPU blackened will be used)?

Answer 1

You can access the data of an af::array object by calling the device() member function. This will give you direct access to the data unless it is being referenced by another af::array or it is a sub-array/view into another array. In those cases the data will be copied.

Example:

array data = randu(10);
float* data_ptr = data.device<float>();

data_ptr[5] = 1337;
data.unlock();
af_print(data);

#+RESULTS:
data
[10 1 1 1]
    0.6010 
    0.0278 
    0.9806 
    0.2126 
    0.0655 
 1337.0000 
    0.2864 
    0.3410 
    0.7509 
    0.4105