In addition to the rapid hardware advancements over the past few years and the availability of ever more powerful graphics cards—now increasingly used for simulations—a great deal has also progressed on the software front. I’m really impressed with DALL-E 2, an AI that creates artistic images from text prompts. I generated the title image for this blog post about heavy rainfall and simulation using DALL-E 2.
There’s also some action under the hood with SplashTool. The underlying library for GPU iteration, ‘cupy’, has been updated. The new version no longer needs a specific CUDA version; it can automatically detect and utilize various CUDA versions. I’ll update SplashTool accordingly by year-end, ensuring that future updates install the new, more user-friendly version. The update release, which will probably include a minor feature addition, is scheduled for January 2023.