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NI LabVIEW 8.5 Gets Right to the Multi-Core

Upgrade helps developers take advantage of multi-core architectures in real time and embedded systems

Beth Stackpole, Contributing Editor -- Design News, September 22, 2008

ANALYSIS & CALCULATION SOFTWARE
LABVIEW 8.5,
NATIONAL INSTRUMENTS

The latest version of National Instruments' flagship embedded system design platform delivers the power of multi-core architectures to engineers and scientists looking to test how their software runs on these new, more powerful chip platforms.

With LabVIEW 8.5, developers can take advantage of multi-core technology in real time and embedded systems, making the adoption of that technology more accessible. The upgrade builds on the automatic multithreading capabilities announced in earlier versions, allowing developers to scale applications based on the total number of available cores, as well as providing drivers and libraries that improve throughput for a variety of RF, high-speed digital i/o and mixed-signal test applications.

Users can easily map their applications to multi-core and FPGA architectures for data streaming, control, analysis and signal processing. Leveraging the LabVIEW Real-Time environment, the 8.5 upgrade also delivers symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) functionality, allowing designers of embedded and industrial systems to automatically load balance tasks across multiple cores without any sacrifice. For the more challenging debugging and code optimization tasks associated with real-time multi-core development, the upgrade features the new NI Real-Time Execution Trace Toolkit 2.0, which visually displays timing relationships between sections of code, as well as the individual threads and processing cores where the code is executing.

“If a developer can more quickly wrap his or her mind around the problem at hand and see how it could be optimized for a parallel hardware architecture, that means a significant reduction in development time,” says Jeff Meisel, NI's LabVIEW product manager.

Another highlight of the 8.5 release is a new Statechart module, used to simulate event occurrences and responses using familiar notations based on the Unified Modeling Language (UML) standard. Because, once again, this module is based on the LabVIEW graphical programming language, engineers are looking at a single platform to design, prototype and deploy their systems quickly. 

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