The Hindu Business Line : Coming of age in a multicore era

How can you do for test and measurement, what the spread sheet did for financial analysis; and for embedded systems, what the personal computer did for the desktop?

If you are National Instruments (NI), you cannily reinvent your flagship product for a new era when engineers who hate maths might yet aspire to design complex systems – and when computer processor manufacturers are putting 2, 4 or 8 separate cores on a single chip.

On Tuesday, NI took the wraps off the new 8.5 version of LabView, the ‘virtual instrumentation’ tool that it created 21 years ago. Co-founder-CEO Dr James Truchard may not have heard of the catchline created by a tobacco company in India in another age — but he did suggest in his opening keynote at the NIWeek developer conference here that LabView and multicore were ‘made for each other’. Why? Because, as Dr Truchard explained to Business Line shortly after the formal announcement, chopping a given problem into bits for separate and parallel solving was part of the DNA of LabView. That gave the tool a head start when it came to exploiting the new capacity for multi threading offered by chip makers such as Intel and AMD which were now putting multiple processors on each chip.

Dramatic ‘live demos’ at the conference drew gasps of awe when a classical number crunching task like Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) was seen to be accomplished in one-fourth the time, when the same LabView routine written for a single core processor was run on the latest Intel quad core-based PC.

Traditional programming languages might soon have to put up a sign saying “Closed for renovation” unless they transformed themselves for the new multi-core era, Dr Truchard suggested.

The new avatar of LabView is more than ever before, a graphical tool – allowing non programmers to rapidly create prototypes of new instruments and measuring systems. Challenges addressed by version 8.5 range from controlling the world’s most powerful instrument — the CERN particle accelerator in Geneva — to creating the Mindstorm robot from ‘lego’ kid’s construction sets.

In his keynote, Dr Truchard also cited the innovative use made of LabView, by engineers of the Indian Railways with scientists at IIT Kanpur, to create a system that checked the wheels of rail cars even as the train went past at top speed.

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