Case Study: RapidMind Platform
RapidMind Multi-core Development Platform
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Multi-core processors present significant potential for performance gains in software applications. Since few applications today take full advantage of this new technology, there is an opportunity for software organizations to gain a competitive advantage. Those applications that are not multi-core enabled will not scale as processor vendors continue to add additional cores, in fact, those applications may get slower as the per core performance decreases.
The RapidMind Multi-core Development Platform allows software organizations to quickly build multi-core capable applications using existing practices, tools, and compilers. Whereas other techniques, such as tools for multi-threading, are difficult, time-consuming, and error prone, the RapidMind platform enables a safe, reliable, and maintainable application. Furthermore, RapidMind-enabled applications will automatically scale to additional cores and future multi-core processors and accelerators (such as GPUs or the Cell).
This document should provide a good understanding of the RapidMind platform: its uses and benefits, how it works, and how software developers can integrate it into their applications. A number of benchmarks (detailed later in this paper) are also provided to demonstrate the tremendous performance advantage provided by the RapidMind platform. These include:
- QMC European option pricing: 7.9x speed-up on 4 cores
- Image Processing Application: 10x speed-up on 8 cores
- Geographic Information Systems (GIS): 17x speed-up on 8 cores
These benchmarks represent performance gains on x86 CPUs. Additional benchmarks for GPU and Cell are also included in this paper.
