Easily Build Applications for Multi-core

Product Overview

Easily build applications for multi-core

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® and Intel®. In addition, RapidMind allows developers to seamlessly take advantage of the application acceleration available from GPUs and the Cell Broadband Engine™.

Impact of multi-core on software development

Multi-core processors offer tremendous performance gains, but few applications take full advantage of this new technology because of the significant complexity of parallelizing across the multiple cores.

Applications that are not multi-core enabled will suffer a performance decrease as it will only run on a single core, and will not scale as the number of cores increases.

While efforts to multi-thread an application may take advantage of multiple cores, these projects are ambitious, time-consuming and error-prone. Multi-threaded applications are harder to develop and test, which requires a level of development expertise which is difficult to find. Software organizations are all too aware of the real fear of releasing an unstable solution that quickly fails in the field.

Traditional approaches force software organizations to choose between either decreased performance or longer, more expensive development cycles. In most cases, these organizations are limiting themselves to single-core processing and leaving incredible business benefits on the table.

Gain a competitive advantage with RapidMind

Multi-core processing presents an opportunity for software organizations to gain a competitive advantage. The award-winning RapidMind Multi-core Development Platform simplifies the development of parallel applications, reducing the cost and timelines of software development when compared to multi-threaded projects, and greatly improves the likelihood of project success.

RapidMind benefits
  • Improve application performance by over 10x
  • More quickly build and deliver multi-core capable applications
  • Leverage multi-core using existing development expertise
  • Use your existing development practices, tools and compilers
  • Automatically scale your application to an increasing number of cores

The RapidMind platform enables software organizations to deliver products faster, with less risk and lower development costs.

Productivity

Software developers focus their skills on the application and not the underlying processor

Performance

Resulting application fully leverages the potential of the processor and all its cores

Portability

Applications are hardware independent and will automatically scale to additional cores and future multi-core processors

RapidMind System Diagram Using RapidMind

Unlike typical multi-threading approaches, RapidMind is a development and runtime platform that enables single-threaded, manageable applications that fully leverage multi-core processors. With RapidMind, developers continue to write code in standard C++ and use their existing skills, tools and processes and the RapidMind platform then “parallelizes” across multiple cores.

API
  • Intuitive, integrates with C++, and requires no new tools, compilers or workflow
Platform
  • Code Optimizer analyzes and optimizes computations to remove overhead
  • Load Balancer plans and synchronizes work to keep all cores fully utilized
  • Data Manager reduces data bottlenecks
  • Diagnostics detects and reports performance bottlenecks
Processor Support Modules
  • AMD, Intel Multi-core x86 CPUs
  • ATI/AMD and NVIDIA GPUs
  • Cell Blade, Cell Accelerator Board, PS3 
(IBM, Mercury, Sony)

Hardware, OS and Compiler Support

CPU
  • AMD, Intel Multi-core x86 CPUs
GPU
  • NVIDIA GeForce® 6000, 7000 or 8000 series cards
  • NVIDIA Quadro® card with Shader Model 3.0 support (e.g. Quadro FX5500)
  • ATI™ x1X00 and 2x00 families of cards
Cell
  • IBM® QS20 Blade server with Cell BE processor with Cell SDK 2.0/2.1
  • Cell BE on Sony PlayStation®3 using Yellow Dog™ Linux with Cell SDK 2.0
  • Cell BE simulator found in Cell SDK 2.0/2.1

Go to IMBThe RapidMind platform is available as part of the IBM Virtual Loaner Program (VLP), which offers no-cost remote access to IBM servers, operating systems, and middleware.

Operating Systems
  • Mac OS X 10.5
  • Windows XP Pro
  • Windows Vista
  • Windows Server 2003
  • Red Hat™ Enterprise Linux 5
  • Fedora™ Core 6 Linux
  • Fedora Core 7 Linux
  • Fedora Core 8 Linux
  • Ubuntu 7.04
  • Ubuntu 7.10
  • Yellow Dog Linux 5 on Sony PlayStation®
Compilers
  • Microsoft® Visual C++® 7 or 8 under Windows
  • GCC 4 under Linux
  • Xcode under Mac OS X