National Instruments joins The Multicore Association, a nonprofit organization focused on shortening time to market for products that involve multicore implementations, by developing standards.
As a member of the association, National Instruments is collaborating with companies such as Intel, Freescale Semiconductor and Wind River to improve the interoperability among operating systems, hardware and software development tools so engineers and scientists can benefit from the performance improvements offered by multicore technology.
“National Instruments has a commanding and diverse knowledge of multicore technology from a software, hardware and operating system perspective,” said Markus Levy, president of The Multicore Association. “Their experience and leadership in developing products that can take advantage of this technology makes them a valuable contributor to the association’s efforts to define the standards for multicore applications.”
National Instruments brings significant experience supporting and using multicore technology to the table, with products such as the LabVIEW graphical development software. LabVIEW simplifies multicore and FPGA-based application development with its intuitive parallel dataflow language. LabVIEW also delivers symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) with the LabVIEW Real-Time environment, making it possible for users to gain performance from multicore processors without sacrificing determinism.
Customers using LabVIEW graphical programming to take advantage of multicore technology include the NASA Ames Research Center for wind tunnel control, Max Planck Institute for nuclear fusion research, Eaton Corporation for transmission testing and Virginia Tech University and Torc Technologies for developing autonomous vehicle vision intelligence. NI also incorporates multicore processors into several of its hardware offerings including controllers available on the PXI and PXI Express platforms.
“The change to multicore programming is as revolutionary as the transition to object-oriented programming was two decades ago, and LabVIEW is ideally suited for this new challenge,” said Dr. James Truchard, National Instruments president, CEO and cofounder.