Multicore industry snapshot

Intel

• Threading Building Blocks [...] rich and complete approach to expressing parallelism in a C++ program. It is a library that helps you take advantage of multi-core processor performance without having to be a threading expert.

RapidMind

• April 2007 RapidMind Secures $10 Million in Venture Capital Financing
• May 2007 RapidMind 2.0 looks for GPGPU gold in parallel workloads
• November 2007 RapidMind takes multi-threaded magic to x86 realm
• December 2007 RapidMind may be the sexiest new tech company you've never heard of
  "There are 20,000 software companies in the world and thousands more in-house development groups in places like banks and insurance services companies," DePaul says. "And they all need to deal with the challenge of [adapting their software for] multicore processors if they want to survive." [...] high-performance computing is the number three growth industry among the high-tech sectors his company monitors. "Only gaming and flat panel televisions are better performing over the last couple of years. It's a $10 or $15 billion market place just on the hardware side."

PeakStream

• September 2006 PeakStream unveils multicore and CPU/GPU programming solution
• June 2007 Google acquires server computer startup PeakStream
  "The two-year-old company had received $17 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Sequoia Capital and Foundation Capital. Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital were the two original financial backers of Google."
• June 2007 Google acquires programming toolmaker PeakStream
  "PeakStream Chief Executive Neil Knox formerly ran Sun Microsystems' x86 and low-end Sparc server business. Like Google and Sun, PeakStream also has Stanford University roots. Its software began as the Brook Project at Stanford by professor Pat Hanrahan, the company's co-founder and chief scientist. The other company co-founder is Chief Technology Officer Matt Papakipos, who was lead architect for Nvidia's GeForce 6 series of graphics chips, also known as the NV4X products. Varun Mehta, formerly of Network Appliance, is vice president of engineering."
• 2007 For Some Reason Google Bought Linux Company PeakStream
  Anyway, PeakStream is no longer selling its platform. In fact, its whole site has disappeared into the ether. The news may or may not come as a blow to AMD, because PeakStream has been focused on ATI chips and its disappearance inside the yawning Googleplex could make things more challenging for the rest of the market, particularly the financial services, medical imaging, defense and oil and gas folks it was aimed at. [...] The last man standing now becomes PeakStream rival RapidMind.

Wind River Systems

• 2005 Newsmaker: Wind River's Linux transformation
  "The time-to-market windows are shrinking, down to nine months from 12 recently. That's shifted customers toward buying software instead of building it. The average OEM (original equipment manufacturer)--Siemens, Sony, Nortel, Motorola--they're spending 62 percent of engineering money on software. Whether they like it or not, they are in the device software business. It's software that's becoming the key differentiator, not the form factor, not the color of the plastic."

QuadrOS

Polycore

• March 2004 PolyCore Software Launches New Multi-Core Software Company; Software platform targets rapidly expanding SoC market.
• August 2006 On-Chip Interconnects for Multi-Core Chips: A Software Perspective

eXludus

• June 2006 RepliCator speeds up data broadcast for bioinformatics applications by 20x.
  Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: SUNW) and eXludus today announced that the RepliCator software reached an unprecedented speedup of 20x over NFS for the data transfers initiated by N1 Grid Engine.

• April 2007 Making Multi-Core Work for You
  Montreal-based eXludus Technologies recently announced a new software product called Schedule Optimizer, which is designed to turbocharge performance on multi-core clusters and grids. GRIDtoday interviewed founder and CEO Benoit Marchand to find out more.

Green Hills Software

VastSystems

Tarari

• February 2005 Tarari Delivers First Multi-Gigabit, Scalable Regular Expression Processor
  Tarari's RegEx-CP is the first solution to process over 200,000 messages/sec, while simultaneously analyzing up to 100,000 expressions. (4Gbps) [...] The high performance of Tarari's RegEx? -CP, supporting up to 100,000 regexes at rates up to 200,000 messages/sec with up to 4 gigabits/second evaluations rates, delivers this precision detection at the rate demanded by today's networks.

Other links

• October 2007 Google and IBM float idea for 'cloud computing'
• December 2007 AMD drives shift in computer software (AMD Senior Fellow, Chuck Moore)
• February 2008 CPU designers debate multi-core future
• February 2008 Wintel will fund parallel software lab at Berkeley
• February 2008 Multicore puts screws to parallel-programming models
• Berkeley Par Lab
• SoC Central