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Tuesday, August 5, 2008 |
I'm at a panel discussion where Dr. T, Jeff K and Ray Almgren from NI are talking about science and engineering education. They all donate a ton of time to education institutions and push for innovative teaching education. We all need to take a strong stance to help encourage math, science and engineering education--and to encourage young people to become engineers. After all, it's engineers who will help make this a better world. (note that more students are going into law--do lawyers make the world a better place?)
6:30:32 PM 
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I'm in Austin and taking a quick break to blog today's news. Here's a summary of LabView 8.6. In addition, NI announced and demonstrated support for Ethernet TCP/IP data acquisition--both wired and wireless. Attendance was a record of almost 2,700.
On opening day of its annual user conference NI Week August 5, National Instruments announced LabView 8.6, the latest version of the graphical system design software platform for control, test and embedded system development. Building on the inherent parallel nature of graphical programming, LabView 8.6 delivers new tools to help engineers and scientists take advantage of the benefits of multicore processors, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and wireless communication.
"To meet the performance and efficiency demands of cutting-edge applications such as controlling robotic systems, testing wireless devices and designing hybrid vehicles, users must have the ability to quickly incorporate the latest technologies such as multicore processors, FPGAs and wireless communication," said Dr. James Truchard, president, chief executive officer and cofounder of National Instruments. "LabView offers the shortest path to apply these technologies using parallel programming while providing users the flexibility to define their solutions with application-specific optimizations."
Built in multithreading technology in LabView enables the company to claim supercomputing performance on mulicore-optimized processors. The new software includes more than 1,200 advanced analysis functions optimized for faster math and signal processing on multicore systems for control and test applications. Some of these include the NI Vision Development Module that automatically distributes data sets across multiple cores. Also using new multicore features, test engineers can develop applications to test wireless devices up to four times faster with the latest version of the NI Modulation Toolkit for LabView, and control system engineers can execute simulation models in parallel up to five times faster with the LabView 8.6 Control Design and Simulation Module. Additionally, engineers now can better identify parallel sections of code using a new feature that reorganizes LabView diagrams.
LabView 8.6 continues to make FPGAs more accessible to domain experts without experience in low-level hardware description languages or board-level design. It also supports wireless network connectivity. Engineers now can configure data acquisition applications easily to use NI WiFi data acquisition (DAQ) hardware without making code changes in LabView 8.6. New 3-D visualization tools in LabView 8.6 help engineers integrate remote measurements with design models to accelerate design validation.
With LabView 8.6, engineers now can convert LabView applications into Web services on desktop and real-time hardware that they can access from any web-enabled device such as smart phones and PCs. With this feature, engineers can develop remote user interfaces for their LabView applications using standard web technologies such as HTML, JavaScript and Flash.
4:19:00 PM
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© Copyright 2008 Gary Mintchell.
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