National Instruments (NI) recently released the latest version of LabVIEW -- LabVIEW 8.5, which delivers the power of multi-core processors to engineers and scientists.

According to Jayaram Pillai, MD, India, Russia & Arabia, NI, new processors with multicore are coming out. Processing power is now split into two separate cores. With multicore, you are doing parallel processing. LabVIEW is a very dataflow programming tool. It is not sequential -- it is decided by the data itself. And inherently, it has always been parallel processing. NI has taken the advantage from LabVIEW 5 -- due to dual-core processing. It used multi-threaded architecture.

Assign different tasks on different cores
With processor technology shifting to multi-core, there is a need to run efficiently on the processor. For LabVIEW, you can assign different tasks on different cores -- which are independent. They don't have to run at the same speed. Those are the challenges multi-core seeks to address.

Pillai said: "The technology NI has, the single application that you can build in LabVIEW, it aids in taking advantage of multicore. Part of a program can be assigned to one core. Another part is, if you don't want to club, it can run on the another core. All of this happens on one program."

So how is the new version better? As you want to accomplish more things, you have to go to higher levels of extractions (or abstractions). The graphical program is a very high level of abstraction. You can accomplish more with the graphical programming.

Another area where LabVIEW is finding itself is in the design space. Building systems today is very complex. NI builds into three stages -- design-prototype-deploy.

As an example, the Railways want to detect trains that have bad wheels. They collect data from railway lines -- lot of signal processing and maths were done. NI knows how to detect defective wheels. It put sensors to that signal, go to the field and do some trials. Once you know the algorithms and the BIOS required, you can go into designing. You take the prototype and make that into a product. Each stage, in the past, used different tools.

Since it is all the way -- from design to deployment -- it can all be done with LabVIEW. This capability -- that it can start at design and prototype, etc., brings greater value to engineers. NI call this process as graphical system design.