Future plans in real time

Jeff Kodosky lives in the present, but is always looking ahead.
That just goes to show how the father of National Instruments’ flagship software product LabVIEW thinks. He is always looking two or more versions ahead--at least.
“The scope has expanded from virtual instrumentation to graphical design,” Kodosky said this morning during his keynote address at NIWeek08 in Austin, Texas. “We now have an enormous amount of power on our desktops” that we need to utilize, he said. “Our machines also have powerful high performance graphics processors to take advantage of.”
But that is today, said Kodosky, who is a co-founder and business and technology fellow at NI. In the future, systems will just be different.
“The architecture of our machines will change over the next decade. The machines will be massively parallel,” he said.
Storage of huge amounts of data will also increase.
“I talk to our new hires and talk about the day when you couldn’t hold your entire music library in your shirt pocket. They just smile and indulge me. It won’t be long before we store petabytes (A petabyte is a unit of information or computer storage equal to one quadrillion bytes or 1,000 terabytes).”
“One of our major goals is to harness the huge graphical issues,” he said.
Part of the way to accomplish that is to keep pushing and utilizing multicore processing.
“One of my favorite quotes about multicore processing comes from Apple's Steven Jobs, who said, ‘nobody knows how to program those things,” well Mr. Jobs we have a room full of people that can program those things,” said Mike Santori, NI business and technology fellow during his portion of the keynote address this morning.