NI Unveils Software Platform for Multicore Applications

Citing a powerful industry trend toward multicore technology, National Instruments recently rolled out a new graphical test and design platform that can handle parallel processor architectures.

LabVIEW 8.5, the latest version of the venerable LabVIEW test and design software, will incorporate new tools and multi-threading capabilities aimed at simplifying the programming of such applications. National Instruments executives say some multicore applications are already using the technology, including a fusion tokamak at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, an automotive transmission testing system developed by Eaton Corp., an automated wheelchair control system from Ambient Corp. and a dynamometer testing system from Wineman Technology Inc.

National Instruments engineers say the new version of LabVIEW fills a growing void in the software market. "The current software tools out there have not been taking advantage of multicore," says P.J. Tanzillo, embedded product manager for National Instruments. "Our tools are well-designed for parallelism and our users are already taking advantage of multicore technologies."

At a recent press conference for LabVIEW 8.5, National Instruments executives were joined by Intel Corp. engineers who reinforced the growing importance of placing multiple processor cores on a single integrated circuit. "Relying on gigahertz to give more and more performance is no longer the way it works," says Ryan Parker, director of marketing for the Embedded Markets Div. of Intel Corp. "We have four cores today and in five years we will have 80 cores."

LabVIEW 8.5 aims to help engineers deal with the multicore trend by incorporating automatic "multithreading" - the ability to create software "threads" that tell the underlying operating system what commands to send to various processor cores. It also incorporates real-time control for such multicore systems and a new statechart module for system level design.

By applying such automatic multithreading and parallel programming, National Instruments claims engineers and scientists can see significant performance gains and greater reliability in their dedicated test and control applications.

"It's very challenging to run multiple cores," says John Pasquarette, director of marketing for NI. "But LabVIEW opens the door for scientists and engineers who are not programming experts to take advantage of that multicore environment."