RapidMind Inc. was a privately held company founded and headquartered in

Waterloo, Ontario Waterloo is a city in the Canadian province of Ontario. It is one of three cities in the Regional Municipality of Waterloo (formerly Waterloo County, Ontario, Waterloo County). Waterloo is situated about west-southwest of Toronto, but it is n ...

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its Provinces and territories of Canada, ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, making it the world's List of coun ...

, acquired by

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

in 2009. It provided a software product that aims to make it simpler for software developers to target

multi-core A multi-core processor (MCP) is a microprocessor on a single integrated circuit (IC) with two or more separate central processing units (CPUs), called ''cores'' to emphasize their multiplicity (for example, ''dual-core'' or ''quad-core''). Ea ...

processors and accelerators such as

graphics processing unit A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed for digital image processing and to accelerate computer graphics, being present either as a discrete video card or embedded on motherboards, mobile phones, personal ...

s (GPUs).

History

RapidMind was started in 2004 based on the academic research related to the Sh project at the

University of Waterloo The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a Public university, public research university located in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is on of land adjacent to uptown Waterloo and Waterloo Park. The university also op ...

. It received a seed round of financing (amount undisclosed) at the beginning of 2006, and raised its

Series A round A series A is the name typically given to a company's first significant round of venture capital financing. It can be followed by the word round, investment or financing. The name refers to the class of preferred stock sold to investors in excha ...

of $10 million Canadian in April 2007. RapidMind was acquired by

on 19 August 2009. Intel continued to sell RapidMind's primary product, a Multi-core Development Platform, through 2010. The RapidMind team and technology was integrated into the Intel Ct research project. The results of the combination were introduced in September 2010 as Intel Array Building Blocks.

Multi-core development platform

The platform was exposed as a set of C++ libraries, which provide types and operations used to express parallel computations."RapidMind: C++ Meets Multicore"
Dr Dobbs Journal (2007-06-08). Retrieved on 2008-10-04. The programming model was primarily data parallel, although it was sufficiently generic to express task-parallel operations. The platform targeted

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel, based on the 8086 microprocessor and its 8-bit-external-bus variant, the 8088. Th ...

processors, GPUs (via

OpenCL OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is a software framework, framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous computing, heterogeneous platforms consisting of central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), di ...

), and the Cell processor.

References

GPGPU Intel acquisitions {{tech-company-stub