Defined by Software

National Instruments continues their 30 year commitment to Virtual Instrumentation this week with the release of LabVIEW 8.5. This year NI attracted over 4000 attendees from 45 countries around the globe to NIWeek in Austin, TX. Judging from the enthusiastic crowd, NI certainly has a loyal following among users, partners and employees.

Historically, NI is known as a leading supplier of test and measurement equipment. However, in the last few years, NI has aggressively pushed its way into the design and control arena. As a result, LabVIEW has evolved to become a powerful graphical systems design platform for not only test and measurement applications, but also control, vision and motion applications.

A new key feature of version 8.5 is the support for Multi-Core processors. As processor manufacturers, like Intel, strive for increased performance, they are shifting to the Multi-Core approach. Right now, a Quad-core is currently available, but Intel pledges they will achieve 80 cores per processor in five years. This multi-core strategy is very attractive to NI because LabVIEW is inherently parallel. LabVIEW is a data flow language that naturally represents tasks in parallel. After all, it was initially designed to model real world systems with devices and instruments that exist in parallel.

What is the impact of multiple cores on engineers? Engineers must create multithreaded applications to benefit from multi-core processors. But programming threads is difficult and requires new functions and techniques. Most engineers are typically not low-level computer programmers. Not that they couldn't learn it, but they are already under a lot of pressure to solve control problems. Engineers need software that deals with application concurrency. LabVIEW 8.5 automatically divides each application into multiple threads, enabling engineers to leverage the performance offered by multi-core technology. Plus, LabVIEW gives engineers the ability to assign specific code to processor cores ensuring deterministic, real time execution.

As automation and control systems have evolved, engineers have come to rely very heavily on software to help them design, configure, program, prototype and deploy applications. Applications are defined by software. After hearing the NI executives speak this week, it is very apparent that NI too is defined by software. When they coined the term Virtual Instrumentation, they defined a system that combines mainstream commercial technologies, such as the PC, with flexible software and a wide variety of measurement and control hardware, so engineers can create user-defined systems that meet their exact application needs. For NI and so many users, that flexible software is LabVIEW.

Another new addition to LabVIEW with version 8.5 is a statechart design module. Statechart is just one more high-level design model that engineers can use in LabVIEW to define their application. Whatever model used to design an application, LabVIEW compiles to run on various control targets, including Desktop, Laptop, PXI, Real-Time OS, FPGA or microprocessor.

National Instruments doesn't claim to be everything to everybody, but they are sure making a statement. Their virtual instrumentation solutions can be used to create custom applications in many industry segments. And if they are lacking in functions needed for a specific application, they have been known to listen to users and fill the gap with both hardware and software additions. Read more about LabView 8.5 or check out NI's available webcasts.

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Rick Zabel
Vice President, Publisher

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