NI keeps going to school

“School’s out for summer” is the name of a popular song of the 70s by Alice Cooper and kids would sing that as loud as they could every June. For National Instruments, school is never out as the virtual instrumentation company continues its push to educate future engineers.
“We are trying to improve the academic landscape to improve technological literacy,” said Ray Almgren, vice president of developer and academic relations for National Instruments during his keynote address today at NIWeek 07 in Austin, Texas.
“The same kids we are worrying about educating are also technologically advanced,” he said. “We need to take advantage of technology and use that to educate them.”
What Almgren said schools have to include hands on learning versus the traditional theory approach, which is part of NI's Kindergarten through Rocket Science program.
“We want to bring cool technology down from the universities to the high schools,” Almgren said.
Kids “are experts at computer games, they are ruthless; they know the technology.”
By using children’s fascination with things like computer games, ipods, cell phones, they can more easily learn, and then also enjoy, classes like math and science.
NI has been working with universities down to elementary schools for quite a few years now and they seem to be making some headway, but as they said, they cannot do it alone, more people have to take action within their own communities to improve math and science curriculums.
To point out how well kids can work out problems using a hands on approach, Almgren brought out 10-year-old Samuel Majors from Findlay, Ohio. Majors will be entering 5th grade next year and he already can program LabView to operate a train set.

Parallel programming for 21 years at NI

Jeff Kodosky just smirks when he talks about the software experts that say multicore processing will wreak havoc on software providers for years to come because they are not ready to tackle the problems associated with the new parallel processing capabilities of PCs today.
He chuckles because the cofounder of National Instruments and the father of LabView confidently said he created the software program 21 years ago with parallelism built into to it.
“I guess you could just call us prescient,” he said during today’s keynote address at NIWeek 07 in Austin, Texas. “The upheaval everyone will face will be a non event for you.”
He said one of the problems software programs have is they are sequential systems, but programs should not be sequences of data, but rather a flow of data.
The idea of multicore processing has been getting big play here at NIWeek. NI said the multicore machines will soon sweep through the industry as a way to hike processor capabilities. PCs today will have two processors, but soon they will have four and then switch to eight. While processors will not increase speed, they will allow for a user to run two different programs in parallel, which will increase the productivity of the computer.

NI’s familiar software, new capabilities

The world is becoming more graphically natured and National Instruments knows to get ahead, they have to remain one step ahead of everyone else.
That is what they say they are accomplishing with its latest software release LabView 8.5. “Because of our system level approach, we are achieving another level of programming capability,” said Dr. James Truchard, president, chief executive and co-founder of National Instruments during his keynote address this morning at NIWeek 07 in Austin, Texas.
“As Steve Jobs said, ‘the journey is the reward.’ With LabView, the journey continues,” Truchard said in front of over 2,000 attendees.
“There is a change coming in the PC industry as it gets further into multicore processing,” Truchard said. “With the shift toward multicore processors on the PC, LabVIEW programmers benefit from a simplified graphical approach to multithreading, making it possible for them to maximize the performance of multicore technology with little or no change to their code.” In other words, with a change to gain more productivity out of a system, the use won’t have to reprogram their system.
With the new LabView release, “all these tools integrate to allow the engineers to do some very nice things,” he said.
When users had to change out their legacy systems, Truchard said, it would cost millions of dollars. Now, with new PC technologies, those systems can simply change out with a PC.
With this latest technology move, software leaders like Microsoft’s Bill Gates said it would take years to catch up with multicore processing, said Tim Dehne, senior vice president of R&D at NI. That may be true with them, he said, but not with LabView.
Dehne then showed in multiple demonstrations how the new software release is capable of handling multicore processing even in extreme cases.