National Instruments Joins The Multicore Association to Improve Interoperability of Multicore-Enabled Software and Hardware

National Instruments today announced it has joined The Multicore Association, a global nonprofit organization focused on developing standards that help shorten time to market for products that involve multicore implementations. As a member of the association, National Instruments is collaborating with leading technology companies including Intel, Freescale Semiconductor and Wind River to improve the interoperability among operating systems, hardware and software development tools so engineers and scientists can benefit from the performance improvements offered by multicore technology.

“National Instruments has a commanding and diverse knowledge of multicore technology from a software, hardware and operating system perspective,” said Markus Levy, president of The Multicore Association. “Their experience and leadership in developing products that can take advantage of this technology makes National Instruments a valuable contributor to The Multicore Association’s efforts to define the standards for multicore applications.”

National Instruments offers more than 30 years of technology leadership to the association as well as significant experience supporting and using multicore technology through products such as NI LabVIEW graphical development software. With more than 10 years of investment in multithreading technology, LabVIEW simplifies multicore and FPGA-based application development with its intuitive parallel dataflow language. LabVIEW also delivers symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) with the LabVIEW Real-Time environment, making it possible for users to gain performance from multicore processors without sacrificing determinism. Customers using LabVIEW graphical programming to take advantage of multicore technology include the NASA Ames Research Center for wind tunnel control, Max Planck Institute for nuclear fusion research, Eaton Corporation for transmission testing and Virginia Tech University and Torc Technologies for developing autonomous vehicle vision intelligence. Additionally, National Instruments incorporates multicore processors into several of its hardware offerings including modular instruments available on PXI, PXI Express, PCI, PCI Express and PCMCIA platforms for increased performance.

“The change to multicore programming is as revolutionary as the transition to object-oriented programming was two decades ago, and LabVIEW is ideally suited for this new challenge,” said Dr. James Truchard, National Instruments president, CEO and cofounder. “National Instruments already has invested 10 years in the multithreading technology in LabVIEW, and its parallel, dataflow approach is ideal for engineers and scientists building multicore applications. We look forward to working with The Multicore Association to define the standards for multicore applications.”

Readers can visit www.ni.com/multicore for multicore programming resources including webcasts and white papers presented by National Instruments, Intel, The Multicore Association, QNX Software Systems and the University of California, Berkeley.