RapidMind Extensions offer breakthrough performance for financial modeling and pricing instruments

WATERLOO, Ontario, Sept. 22 -- RapidMind, provider of the RapidMind Multi-core Development Platform, today announced the launch of the RapidMind Financial Extensions, add-ons to the RapidMind platform that accelerate the development of applications such as those for computational finance. This solution is one in a line of RapidMind Extensions that include customizable software components targeting specific verticals that, in conjunction with the RapidMind platform, can be used to quickly build applications for multicore processors and accelerators. The RapidMind Financial Extensions are already being used to accelerate critical algorithmic trading applications.

"Given recent events on Wall Street, there is now an even greater need for stable, high performance systems that will accurately and quickly calculate risk and prices, and immediately detect and respond to opportunities in a high volume, volatile, and unpredictable market," said Larry Cohen, CEO of Accelerated Computing Solutions. "Always looking to gain a first mover advantage with faster technology, in volatile and equally important in BAU (business as usual) times, portfolio and risk managers are seeking innovative approaches to run complex models and algorithms in ways that fully exploit the capabilities of the latest multicore processors and hardware accelerators."

The RapidMind platform already lets financial organizations focus on their internal algorithmic expertise yet quickly deploy applications on the best possible hardware. For example, RapidMind and AMD recently partnered to demonstrate a 55x performance increase of a financial algorithm running on an AMD FireStream 9170 graphics processor unit (GPU). The same RapidMind implementation runs 13 times faster than Quantlib on a quad-core CPU.(1)

"RapidMind is a key technology partner in our ecosystem of software and service providers," said Patricia Harrell, director of AMD Stream Computing. "RapidMind's Multi-Core Development Platform gives our financial customers a unique advantage when it comes to harnessing the compute capacity of the AMD FireStream 9170 or using multicore CPUs for intensive financial computations."

Multicore processors and accelerators present significant potential for performance gains in these software applications. Since few applications today take full advantage of this new technology, there is an opportunity for financial organizations to gain a competitive advantage. The RapidMind Multi-core Development Platform allows software organizations to quickly build applications that can harness the full potential of the latest multicore processors as well as seamlessly take advantage of the application acceleration available in today's stream processors such as the GPU or the Cell Broadband Engine.

RapidMind has taken the experience gained working with financial services companies and packaged highly efficient financial extensions to allow development organizations to quickly realize the performance benefits of these new processors.

RapidMind at 2008 High Performance on Wall Street Conference & Exhibition

RapidMind is showcasing live demonstrations of the 55x performance improvement of a Binomial option pricing calculator in booth 221 at the High Performance on Wall Street Conference & Exhibit September 22 at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City.

About RapidMind

RapidMind has created the RapidMind Multi-core Development Platform to simplify the development of parallel applications, minimizing the impact on traditional lifecycle costs and timelines. Developers of HPC and enterprise software are using RapidMind today to create manageable, single-threaded applications that leverage the full potential of multicore processors from AMD and Intel and to seamlessly take advantage of the application acceleration available from GPUs and the Cell Broadband Engine. For more information on RapidMind, visit http://www.rapidmind.com or http://blogs.rapidmind.com.

(1) RapidMind has reported a 55x speedup over CPU alone on binomial options pricing calculators. The comparison is versus Quantlib running on a single core of a Dual-Core AMD Opteron 2352 processor on Tyan S2915 w/ Win XP 32 (Palomar Workstation from Colfax).

-----

Source: RapidMind