Rapidmind + Intel

By James Reinders (Intel) (48 posts) on August 19, 2009 at 10:25 am

Data Parallelism need not seem like parallelism when writing software. The advantages in avoiding “feeling like you have to learn, or deal with, parallelism” are substantial. Imagine programming, feeling familiar and intuitive, which is scalable for more and more processor cores and has safety by default (safety from data races and deadlock). That’s been our vision for our product using Intel Ct technology. Now we’ve joined up with Rapidmind, people who share our vision.

Rapidmind and Intel together

The Rapidmind founders, engineering team and marketing team have joined Intel this week. Intel has acquired the Rapidmind products and technology. 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.

We are continuing to sell and support Rapidmind products. We have deep respect for the investments Rapidmind customers have made in using and believing in the Rapidmind platform, and we are counting on making software developers happy with what we can do for them now that our teams are together. We are working together now on our joint plans for the integration of Rapidmind and Intel Software Products including Intel Ct technology for data parallelism.

We've been talking with customers, who are using Rapidmind products, about our plans together and the feedback has been very positive. We have exciting things in store for the future. Our product plans for Intel Ct technology are on track for beta before the end of the year, and the integration with Rapidmind products will come in phases after the first beta is available. This will enable us to offer the best solution our joint team can create. If you are not on our mailing list for our Intel data parallel newsletter, I encourage you to sign up.

A little background

Rapidmind was founded five years ago as Serious Hack Inc. by Prof. McCool and Stefanus Du Toit to commercialize a novel programming system called Sh. (Their book on Sh has a multi-colored triceratops on the cover.) Sh grew out of work directed by Prof. McCool, at the University of Waterloo, exploring advanced programming interfaces for the graphics processors embedded in video cards. The product has also been expanded to target additional processors, such as the IBM Cell, and to enable a broader set of applications. The company name was changed to Rapidmind.

I remember first talking with them myself at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden a few years ago when I was deep in my final draft of my book on Intel Threading Building Blocks. I was impressed how complementary our approaches are to each other and how having multiple options for software development is really important for effective parallel programming. It’s exciting to have the opportunity to work with the whole team in Waterloo and be part of planning on how to bring it all together.

Parallelism of all kinds supported

Looking across what we can offer from Intel now is impressive: complete OpenMP 3.0 support in our Fortran and C/C++ compilers for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X, support for Intel Threading Building Blocks that spans all those operating systems and more with support for many platforms including Intel, PowerPC and SPARC, and we have the recently introduced Intel Parallel Studio with support for parallel processing tailored for the Visual Studio developer. All these are full products with widespread acceptance and usage. Now, we add the Rapidmind products as well!

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!

All of these technologies/products complement each other, and offer the diversity and complete development solutions needed for a multicore world with forward-scaling built-in.

Share your ideas, let’s talk!

I encourage you to visit the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) September 22-24, 2009 in San Francisco to hear more about Intel software developer tools, including our product with Intel Ct technology and Rapidmind. There will be a class by Anwar Ghuloum at IDF on that very topic, I’ll be in attendance… and I’m planning to see some very cool demos. We’ll also be together at Supercomputing 2009 in my hometown – Portland Oregon. Hopefully we’ll see you at one or both events – and we’ll have a chance to talk in person about your ideas and questions.

 

Categories: Parallel Programming
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Comments (7)

August 19, 2009 10:59 PM PDT


Yibing		 This should be a good news for programmers, hard to say the same for your (potential) competitors. Back in March, the announcement of Intel and Wind River join effort in providing multi-core programming solutions in the embedded field was already impressive. This new acquirement of Rapid Mind makes sense, Cilk++ is the next? I had wished that Cilk++ and the C++ thread extension effort could somehow become a unified solution. With openMP, you've got almost all the sound solutions now. What I also expect, though, is that Intel will also provide much impressive multi-core architectures with memory-wall and cache usage in consideration, and/or help standardized such architectures for targeted application domains.
August 20, 2009 10:50 AM PDT

Dmitriy Vyukov
Dmitriy VyukovTotal Points:
43,894
Black Belt
 Yibing, take a look at this:
http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2009/07/31/cilk-intel/
August 21, 2009 4:28 AM PDT


IT Support London		 The Rapidmind team sound like they will really be a great addition for multi-core processors.
Do you think that the developement in data parallelism can be compared to the developement in virtualisation in relation to cloud computing?
August 29, 2009 2:03 PM PDT


dan mendes		 A question: How soon will a Intel Rapidmind demo be available for public demonstration? (Ala what Intel did for Havok.)

And some gratuitous ranting:{ Don't get me wrong but someone needs to unify all this stuff into a solution, because it's getting kind of out of hand the amount of proposed parallel concurrent frameworks and solutions that actually only solve half of the riddle, and not the whole puzzle. It's like having a screwdriver that only screw half way...

Coding has become a boring task again, all this plumbing code seriously gets in my nerves. Build a kernel, configure this, create a context for that, etc... i think i am going to give up on being a programmer! It's becoming less and less a creative effort and more and more a technical job. We need some smartness to kick in and handle the scaffolding, the dirty pipe work, automatically for developers.

I really don't want to spend of of my day, doing mechanical, setup work. }
September 9, 2009 2:54 AM PDT


Neil Murphy		 What will happen to the rapidmind existing forums? Also, I understand that rapidmind was available for non commerical / trial usage at some point but can find no current reference now. Is intel going to make this product easily available to individual developers to experiment with or just high priced corporate products?

Finally at a technical level is it viable to include rapidmind in other technologies than C++. It is described as a library, and if it works as a library is it not possible to make it available to other languages ad technologies by some kind of language binding? e.g. to Python, Eiffel, java?
October 1, 2009 8:53 AM PDT

pmd12345
pmd12345
 I just heard that Stream Processors closed their doors.
I think the C language extensions, compiler and software tools they developed are interesting and maybe better than alternatives for stream computing.
It's too bad that they positioned themselves as a dsp chip company only and made no effort to publicize their good work on parallel development tools.
September 16, 2010 1:55 AM PDT


Technoxsoft company		 In principal I really agree with what you are saying.

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