RapidMind, makers of the RapidMind Multi-Core Development Platform, was honoured with the 2008 Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE) ‘Mind to Market’ award which celebrates the best OCE-supported, commercially successful collaboration between Ontario’s most innovative research and industry partners. Selected by a panel of leading minds in science and commerce from across Ontario, RapidMind won this year’s award on the basis of their innovative technology, commercial success and impact on their marketplace. RapidMind’s technology is used today in life saving cancer detection software, diverse 3D visualization, film and video content generation and financial analysis. In just over a year, RapidMind has become the industry standard in harnessing the power of multi-core processing. “RapidMind exemplifies what happens when you bring the imagination and talent of Ontario companies together with the brilliance of our academic researchers,” said Mark Romoff, OCE President and CEO. “RapidMind is an amazing illustration of what you can achieve when you provide our best and brightest with the resources and tools to drive innovation to the marketplace.” Developed from an astounding idea at the University of Waterloo, RapidMind is now able to drive software applications to unparalleled levels of speed and performance by fully harnessing the power of multi-core processors. “There was a critical shift from single to multiple core processors happening which is challenging the entire software industry and RapidMind has developed the solution to this problem,” said Ray DePaul, President and CEO of RapidMind. “OCE funded our initial research and provided capital to commercialize this technology. Supported by industry partners such as AMD, Hewlett-Packard and IBM, RapidMind is now considered the industry standard.” Developers of high performance computing and enterprise software are using RapidMind today to create manageable, single-threaded applications that leverage the full potential of multi-core processors from AMD and Intel and to seamlessly take advantage of the application acceleration available from graphics processor units (GPUs) and the Cell Broadband Engine™. OCE has supported high-performance computer research since the mid-1990s. Its Market Readiness program helped establish the company and secure its first customer contract. OCE also invested in RapidMind in its early days through its Accelerator program which later attracted the attention of venture capitalists who invested $11M in the company.