6 August 2009

… New version of LabVIEW hits the street

"We can't be at the same level (of innovation) we have done over the past 10 years," said John Graff, vice president of marketing and customer operations during his presentation at NIWeek 2009 Worldwide Graphical System Design Conference in Austin, Tex. "We must find ways to do more."

Those two words, “Do More” are now part of NI’s mantra. “We want to provide the tools and technologies we believe can help you do more,” he said.

One of those tools is what seems to be an annual rite at NI’s user group: A release of NI’s flagship product LabVIEW. This year’s new offering, called LabVIEW 2009 has some additions, one of which makes it possible to deploy code to wireless sensor networks to help engineers and scientists build smarter industrial measurement and monitoring systems and features new ways to test multiple wireless standards.

In addition, LabVIEW 2009 can simplify real-time math by streamlining mathematical algorithm design and deployment to real-time hardware.

Today’s engineering environment all comes down to cutting as much cost out of the system as possible. With virtualization technology, it is possible to run multiple operating systems side by side on the same multi core processing hardware to build more efficient systems.

NI’s new Real-Time Hypervisor software can now work with the LabVIEW Real-Time Module with general-purpose OS capabilities to reduce overall system cost and size. Using this software, engineers can run Windows XP and LabVIEW Real-Time side by side on the same controller, partitioning the processor cores between the two operating systems for more efficient use of system resources, NI officials said. The Real-Time Hypervisor works with dual- and quad-core NI PXI controllers as well as the NI Industrial Controller.

—Gregory Hale

For related information, go to www.isa.org/productivity.