RapidMind today announced that its RapidMind Platform was named as a “Best of Tech-Ed Awards 2007” winner in the Most Innovative Product category by Penton Media’s Windows IT Pro, SQL Server Magazine and Office & Sharepoint Pro.com. The judges reviewed over 260 IT products and services submitted for the contest and chose 45 finalists for review at Tech-Ed in Orlando, Fla., June 4-8. Winners were announced on June 6 at an evening reception at the Peabody Hotel Orlando. “This is the sixth year of this awards program and every year we see a substantial increase in the number and level of entries,” said Karen Forster, group editorial and strategic director. “While we had many worthy products, the winners clearly demonstrated their products’ strategic importance to the market, competitive advantages and the value they provide to customers.” The RapidMind Platform enables developers to more quickly and easily build higher-performing applications that for the first time exploit the full capabilities of multi-core processors, including the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.) from IBM and graphics processor units (GPUs) from AMD and NVIDIA. The resulting application is portable and can run on multiple types of processors and operating systems. More than 1,000 developers of high-performance computing (HPC) and enterprise applications are using RapidMind to achieve the performance benefits of these new, exceptionally fast multi-core processors. “We are pleased to be selected as a winner in the Best of Tech-Ed 2007 awards. This is a strong endorsement for not only our technology, but also highlights the challenges that multi-core processors present,” said RapidMind president and CEO, Ray DePaul. “The RapidMind Platform provides software developers with a solution that addresses the critical issue of how to take advantage of multi-core processors. We sincerely appreciate Windows IT Pro, SQL Server Magazine, and Office & Sharepoint Pro.com’s recognition of our technical and market leadership.” The RapidMind Platform v2.0 is available immediately. The free, full-featured RapidMind Developer Edition is available for evaluation by download from its Web site.