[Accelerate](https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Accelerate/Reference/AccelerateFWRef/_index.html) is a framework that provides high-performance functions for matrix math, digital signal processing, and image manipulation. It harnesses [SIMD](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.
> Curious about the name _Surge_? Back in the mid 90's, Apple, IBM, and Motorola teamed up to create [AltiVec](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltiVec) (a.k.a the Velocity Engine), which provided a SIMD instruction set for the PowerPC architecture. When Apple made the switch to Intel CPUs, AltiVec was ported to the x86 architecture and rechristened [Accelerate](https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Accelerate/Reference/AccelerateFWRef/_index.html). The derivative of Accelerate (and second derivative of Velocity) is known as either [jerk, jolt, surge, or lurch](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerk_%28physics%29), hence the name of this library.
> It was difficult to make a reasonable performance comparison between the two implementations, as the Accelerate-backed function did not register >= 1 msec runtime until `n = 1000000`. At `n = 100000000`, the naive implementation effectively timed out after several minutes.
>
> Surge's performance characteristics have not yet been thoroughly evaluated, though initial benchmarks show incredible promise. Further investigation is definitely warranted.
_The infrastructure and best practices for distributing Swift libraries are currently in flux during this beta period of Swift & Xcode. In the meantime, you can add Surge as a git submodule, drag the `Surge.xcodeproj` file into your Xcode project, and add `Surge.framework` as a dependency for your target._
> Surge functions are named according to their corresponding "Math.h" functions, where applicable (omitting `f` and `d` affixes, since type information is communicated and enforced by the language's type system).
