LabVIEW gets an upgrade

National Instruments LabVIEW 8.5 is the latest version of the company's popular graphical system design platform for test, control and embedded system development.

With the adoption of next-generation processors, engineers and scientists must consider how their software can deliver the potential performance gains of multicore and FPGA-based systems. With the parallel dataflow language of LabVIEW, users can map their applications to multicore and FPGA architectures for data streaming, control, analysis and signal processing.

Building on the automatic multithreading capability of earlier versions, LabVIEW 8.5 scales user applications based on the total available number of cores and delivers thread-safe drivers and libraries to improve throughput for RF, high-speed digital I/O and mixed-signal test applications.

LabVIEW 8.5 also delivers symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) with the LabVIEW Real-Time environment where designers of embedded and industrial systems automatically can load balance tasks across multiple cores without sacrificing determinism.

With the latest version, users can also manually assign portions of code to specific processor cores to fine-tune real-time systems or isolate time-critical sections of code on a dedicated core. To meet the more challenging debugging and code optimisation requirements of real-time multicore development, engineers tists can use the new NI Real-Time Execution Trace Toolkit 2.0 to visually display timing relationships between sections of their code and the individual threads and processing cores where the code is executing.