APPLICATIONS

RapidMind Announces General Availability of Next Generation Software Platform with Support for Cell/B.E. from IBM, and GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA: RapidMind Inc. today announced the general availability of the RapidMind Platform v2.0. The RapidMind software solution enables developers to more quickly and easily run higher-performing applications that exploit the full capabilities of multi-core processors, including Cell Broadband Engine' (Cell/B.E.) and graphics processor units (GPUs). RapidMind v2.0 offers the widest hardware and operating system support and broadest applicability in enterprise and high-performance computing (HPC). “IDC research shows that application developers are already struggling to make code run efficiently on systems with dual-core nodes, and systems with hundreds or thousands of cores per node are not many years away,” said Steve Conway, IDC research vice president, Technical Computing Systems. “RapidMind has targeted a crucial, rapidly growing problem for technical computing programmers and end users alike.” With RapidMind, developers continue to use standard C++ and their existing compilers and tools, and rely on the RapidMind platform to “parallelize” across multiple cores. More than 1,000 developers of HPC and enterprise software are using RapidMind to simultaneously gain the performance benefits of the new, exceptionally fast multi-core processors and the ease of single-threaded, single-core programming. “The RapidMind platform abstracts away the complexities of multi-core programming, allowing RTT to harness the tremendous performance of GPUs,” said Peter Stevenson, chief operating officer of RTT USA, a worldwide leading supplier of three-dimensional, real-time visualization technologies and services for industrial applications in the automotive, aircraft and consumer-goods industries. “With RapidMind, we can quickly roll out applications that provide our customers with unprecedented capabilities in lightning-fast timelines once thought impossible. Our real-time, interactive RTT RealTrace system is one such example.” RapidMind partnered with multiple providers of multi-core processing platforms in creating the RapidMind Platform v2.0. “Through our Virtual Loaner Program, IBM is making Cell Blades widely accessible to software developers evaluating our unrivaled technology. RapidMind, pre-installed on the Cell Blades, will be a crucial element of this program,” said Jim Comfort, vice president, workload optimized solutions, IBM Global Engineering Solutions. “RapidMind allows developers to tap the enormous performance benefits of Cell/B.E. without the complexity of customizing code for the underlying architecture.” Added Dinesh Sharma, director, AMD Stream Computing: “Our ‘Close To Metal’ CTM program was introduced for companies exactly like RapidMind. AMD’s Accelerated Computing initiative harnesses compute engines such as AMD stream processors, allowing for massively parallel computation in new applications. RapidMind makes it very simple for software vendors to take advantage of these new levels of performance.” Multi-core processing offers breakthrough potential in HPC and enterprise applications, such as digital media, oil and gas, financial, biosciences, and scientific computing. “Ultimately, our solution frees software developers to focus their skills on building applications that are hardware independent and will automatically scale to additional cores and future multi-core processors,” said Ray DePaul, president and CEO of RapidMind. “The RapidMind platform enhances application programmability, performance and portability. We make multi-core programming painless.” Product availability and supported platforms The RapidMind platform v2.0 is available immediately. The free, full-featured RapidMind Developer Edition is available for evaluation by download from the RapidMind website. The RapidMind platform offers both Windows and Linux support for the ATI Radeon X1000 family of GPUs, NVIDIA GPUs including the Quadro card, GeForce series cards and Cell/B.E. hardware. Click here full list of supported hardware, operating system and compilers.