RapidMind aims to allow developers to leverage multi-core CPU power

By Ann Steffora Mutschler, Senior Editor -- Electronic News, 11/5/2007

To allow software organizations to take advantage of the performance gains offered by multi-core CPU processors from companies such as AMD and Intel, Ontario, Canada-based RapidMind Inc., which creates software to develop parallel applications today announced that a new release of its multi-core development platform.

The company reminded that processor vendors such as AMD and Intel are adding cores to boost performance, but that few applications have realized the gains because of the complexity of parallelizing across multiple cores. RapidMind said it recently demonstrated the ease by which 5 to 10x performance advantages in financial and digital media applications were accomplished on multi-core CPUs.

Developers are still limiting themselves to single-core processing and leaving benefits on the table instead of adopting ambitious, but time-consuming and error-prone projects that would exploit multi-core capabilities.

RapidMind believes it has locked in on a key need by allowing applications to utilize multi-core processing power without requiring the complexity of multi-threaded programming. The company said its platform is being used to develop applications for database transactions, image/video manipulation, enterprise search, data mining, real-time data analysis, 3-D visualization, broadcast-quality encoding, medical imaging, film and TV content generation, image and signal processing, financial analysis, and seismic analysis, among others.

The company also noted that developers of HPC and enterprise software are using the RapidMind platform to create single-threaded applications that leverage the full potential of multi-core processors from AMD and Intel as well as take advantage of the application acceleration available from GPUs and the Cell Broadband Engine.

As a member of both the HP multi-core optimization and accelerator programs, RapidMind said it is collaborating with HP on products aimed at delivering increasing levels of application performance in the face of the challenges created by the industry’s transition to multi-core processors.

The RapidMind platform is meant to allow flexibility to quickly adapt to new processors with increasing complexity and numbers of cores, as well as the ability to accelerating applications further on accelerators such as GPUs and the Cell.

Version 3.0 of RapidMind’s platform will be available next month.

The RapidMind Platform contains Windows and Linux support for multi-core CPUs from AMD and Intel, in addition to the ATI Radeon 1X00 and 2X00 families of GPUs, NVIDIA GPUs including the Quadro card, GeForce series cards and Cell/B.E. hardware.