Intel has
acquired multicore software specialist RapidMind
with plans to integrate RapidMind's platform and Intel software
products and technologies, including the Intel Ct technology for
data parallelism.
RapidMind was founded five years ago as Serious Hack by
University of Waterloo Professor Michael McCool and Stefanus Du
Toit to commercialise Sh, a programming system created at the
Canada school.
According to the company, developers continue to write code in
standard C++ using their existing skills, tools, and processes and
the RapidMind platform then allows parallelization across multiple
cores.
On RapidMind's Web site, the company claims that developers of
HPC and enterprise software are using its platform "to create
manageable, single-threaded applications that leverage the full
potential of multicore processors from Intel and AMD." In addition,
RapidMind said its platform allows developers to take advantage of
the application acceleration available from GPUs and the Cell
Broadband Engine.
With the acquisition, Intel has acquired RapidMind's products
and technology, aiming to support parallelism of all kinds. The
company will continue to sell RapidMind products. Intel said
RapidMind's founders, engineering team, and marketing team joined
the company this week.
Intel announced the acquisition without making an official press
statement. Instead, the company on the morning of August 19,
blogged about its buy, singing RapidMind's praises.
"RapidMind proved itself to be an innovative company with
advanced technology for helping software developers with data
parallel programming for multicore processors and accelerators.
Their joining Intel will let us do even greater things together,"
the post by James Reinders, an Intel expert in parallelism,
states.
Intel outlined plans for RapidMind products while boasting that
it already offers complete OpenMP 3.0 support in its Fortran and
C/C++ compilers for
Linux,
Windows, and Mac OS X; support for Intel Threading Building Blocks
that spans those operating systems and more with support for
platforms including Intel, PowerPC, and SPARC; and its recently
introduced Intel Parallel Studio with support for parallel
processing for the Visual Studio developer.
"This year we'll introduce the beta for our product based on
Intel Ct technology, and next year we'll introduce the result of
integration of Cilk++ as well as RapidMind into our product lines.
Oh, they'll be more things to unveil too - but this blog is getting
a bit too long to explain all that now!"
Intel said that all of these technologies and products
complement each other, and "offer the diversity and complete
development solutions needed for a multicore world with
forward-scaling built-in."
Intel also issued a second blog post on the afternoon of August
19, encouraging its audience to "join many Intel parallelization
experts at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) September 22-24, 2009 in
San Francisco, including folks from the RapidMind and Ct technology
team."
The buy comes of the heels of Intel's $884 million acquisition
Wind River Systems Inc, announced in June. Wind River develops
operating systems, middleware, and software design tools for a
variety of embedded computing systems. Its main products include
VxWorks, a proprietary and multicore-ready real-time operating
system, and commercial-grade Linux software platforms. With that
move, Intel targeted embedded systems and mobile handheld devices
as it continued to extend itself beyond its traditional PC
boarders.
Intel did not disclose the purchase price for RapidMind.
By Suzanne Deffree, Managing Editor, News - Electronic
News