Cure for the Multicore Blues

The Canadian software company, RapidMind, has developed a new software tool to help programmers write code for microprocessor chips like the Cell as well as for graphic processors from ATI Technologies, Nvidia Corp., and other companies. Called RapidMind Development Platform 2.0, it allows programmers to code their entire applications to run on multiple cores. In practice, however, users have fed the RapidMind platform the most computationally intensive portions of their programs. The platform accelerates these chunks by breaking them up into smaller pieces and running them in parallel on several processor cores at once. The RapidMind platform has been successfully used to create the first real-time ray-tracing visualization program for customers like DaimlerChrysler and Porsche