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The power of multicore, real-time processors brought to engineers and scientists
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October 2007
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With the adoption of next-generation processors, engineers and scientists must consider how their software can deliver the potential performance gains of multicore and FPGA-based systems, and so National Instruments has announced LabVIEW 8.5.
Designers of industrial machines, robotics, mechatronics systems and industrial control applications can see performance gains from multicore technology with LabVIEW 8.5 by balancing parallel tasks such as control loops, measurements and industrial communication, among multiple processing cores. The latest version of LabVIEW offers:
- Deterministic real-time multithreading, improved thread-safe I/O drivers and automatic scaling based on the total available number of processing cores to deliver performance gains
- An extension of multicore performance for applications to real-time embedded systems with symmetric multiprocessing in LabVIEW Real-Time
- The new NI Real-Time Execution Trace Toolkit 2.0 to visually display timing relationships between sections of code and the individual threads to meet the more challenging debugging and code optimisation requirements of real-time multicore development
- Multichannel filtering and PID control algorithms to significantly reduce the FPGA resources required for high-performance machine control systems
- A new statechart module to help engineers design and simulate these event-based systems using familiar, high-level statechart notations based on the Unified Modeling Language (UML) standard.
Also, NI has announced the newest National Instruments PXI products, which sustain higher data streaming rates than ever before possible with an industry-standard test and measurement platform. With these new data streaming capabilities, engineers can achieve higher sustained acquisition and generation rates, reduce test times and meet new application challenges.
The new NI PXIe-5442 16-bit arbitrary waveform generator can stream from disk at the full rate of 100 MS/s (200 MB/s) for generation of arbitrary waveforms up to several terabytes in length. The NI PXIe-5442 module complements the company’s existing NI PXIe-5122 100 MS/s, two-channel digitiser and NI PXIe-6536/7 25/50 MHz, 32-channel digital I/O modules to provide a full IF/baseband and mixed-signal streaming offering.
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Author
Chris Rowlands
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