Intel has confirmed that it has successfully completed the acquisition of RapidMind, a software company specialising in simplifying the development of parallel applications.
RapidMind first appeared some five years ago at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, under the guidance of professors Michael McCool and Stefanus Du Toit. It has since grown popular due to its primary product - the RapidMind Multi-core Development Platform, a C++ solution designed to simplify the development of parallel applications.
The majority of modern-day processors feature multiple physical or virtual cores, but although Intel has long advocated the benefits of multi-core processors, many of today's software applications continue not to take advantage of parallelism.
Intel hopes its acquisition of RapidMind will assist with the development of applications that utilise a processor's many cores, with the company stating that "RapidMind proved itself to be an innovative company with advanced technology for helping software developers with data parallel programming for multi-core processors and accelerators."
Although RapidMind's development platform will continue to sell, Intel has plans to integrate the technology in its own product lines at a later stage. Commenting on a blog post, Intel's James Reinders said: "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!"
Earlier this year, Intel also completed the acquisition of software houses Cilk and Wind River Systems.
