RapidMind Slashes Time and Costs Required to Develop Applications for Multi-core Processors
WATERLOO, Ontario -- Nov. 5, 2007 RapidMind Inc. today announced a major new release of its flagship product with the introduction of RapidMind Multi-core Development Platform v3.0. RapidMind's revolutionary software solution enables software organizations to more quickly take advantage of the tremendous performance gains offered by the new multi-core CPU processors from industry leaders such as AMD and Intel. RapidMind recently demonstrated the ease by which 5x to 10x performance advantages in financial and digital media applications were accomplished on multi-core CPUs.
Processor vendors such as AMD and Intel are adding cores to boost performance, however, few applications have actually realized those gains because of the significant complexity of parallelizing across the multiple cores. Instead of launching into ambitious, but time-consuming and error-prone projects that would exploit the terrific new capabilities, developers are still limiting themselves to single-core processing and leaving potentially incredible business benefits on the table. RapidMind has locked in on a key need in the software industry by enabling applications to fully utilize multi-core processing power without requiring the complexity of multi-threaded programming.
Over a thousand developers of high-performance computing (HPC) and enterprise software are using RapidMind to realize the performance benefits of new multi-core processors. The RapidMind platform is being successfully leveraged in developing applications for database transactions, image/video manipulation, enterprise search, data mining, real-time data analysis, three-dimensional visualization, broadcast-quality encoding, medical imaging, film and TV content generation, image and signal processing, financial analysis, seismic analysis, and others.
"IBM customers understand both the opportunity and challenges caused by the shift to multi-core processors. RapidMind is addressing an industry-wide problem," said Jim Comfort, vice president for optimized systems, IBM Global Engineering Solutions. "By partnering with RapidMind, IBM can deliver the products and expertise our customers need to gain a competitive advantage in this new era of multi-core processing. IBM and RapidMind are in a unique position to allow software organizations to realize new levels of performance on x86 processors, as well as unprecedented acceleration on IBM's Cell blade systems."
Developers of HPC and enterprise software are using RapidMind today to create manageable, single-threaded applications that leverage the full potential of multi-core processors from AMD(R) and Intel(R) and to seamlessly take advantage of the application acceleration available from GPUs and the Cell Broadband Engine(TM). Using RapidMind v3.0 can reduce the cost and effort of software development when compared to multi-threaded programming--and greatly improves the likelihood of project success.
As a member of both the HP Multi-core Optimization and Accelerator Programs, RapidMind is collaborating with HP on solutions intended to deliver increasing levels of application performance in the face of the challenges created by the industry's transition to multi-core processors.
"Effectively leveraging multi-core technology is critical to our customers' success," said Ed Turkel, Manager of Product Marketing for High Performance Computing at HP. "RapidMind's technologies facilitates development of applications optimized for our multi-core solutions, including solutions using application accelerators. HP is delighted to have RapidMind's platform as a key component of our multi-core toolkit."
The RapidMind platform offers flexibility to quickly adapt to new processors with ever increasing complexity and numbers of cores. RapidMind also provides the ability of accelerating applications even further, on accelerators such as GPUs and the Cell. As a member of the HP Accelerator program, RapidMind works with HP to provide accelerator solutions using various accelerators technologies.
"We selected RapidMind to quickly achieve competitive performance gains in our digital media video encoding and transcoding products," said Sudy Shen, president and CEO, Masstech Group Inc. "By adopting the RapidMind platform, we are exploiting the powerful capabilities of multi-core processors, while also accelerating our application using the GPU."
"Multi-core processing is the most promising opportunity to gain competitive advantage that is available to software organizations, but this opportunity won't last forever," added Ray DePaul, president and chief executive officer of RapidMind. "Companies who do not poise themselves to quickly take advantage of the higher-performing processors simply will be left behind. The RapidMind platform enables these organizations to deliver product faster, with less risk and lower development cost."
Product availability and supported platforms
The RapidMind Platform v3.0 will be generally available December 2007.
The RapidMind Platform now offers both Windows(R) and Linux(R) support for multi-core CPUs from AMD and Intel, in addition to the ATI Radeon(TM) 1X00 and 2X00 families of GPUs, NVIDIA(R) GPUs including the Quadro(R) card, GeForce(R) series cards and Cell/B.E. hardware. Please visit http://www.rapidmind.com for the full list of supported hardware and operating systems.
About RapidMind
RapidMind provides the award-winning RapidMind Multi-core Development Platform that simplifies the development of parallel applications, minimizing the impact on traditional lifecycle costs and timelines. Developers of HPC and enterprise software are using RapidMind today to create manageable, single-threaded applications that leverage the full potential of multi-core processors from AMD(R) and Intel(R) and to seamlessly take advantage of the application acceleration available from GPUs and the Cell Broadband Engine(TM). For more information on RapidMind, visit http://www.rapidmind.com.
RapidMind and the RapidMind logo are trademarks of RapidMind Inc. ATI Radeon and AMD are registered trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. IBM is a registered trademark of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States or other countries or both. Cell Broadband Engine is a trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. Intel and Xeon are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. NVIDIA, NVIDIA Quadro and GeForce are registered trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation. Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation.