Posted to News on 10th Apr 2008, 11:09
Free, hands-on multicore programming workshops
National Instruments is announcing an initiative sponsored by Intel Corporation to deliver free, hands-on multicore programming workshops based on the NI LabVIEW graphical programming language to engineers and scientists around the globe. The Multicore Programming with NI LabVIEW Hands-On Workshop is presented in 18 American and Canadian cities from May 2008 and 15 international cities this autumn. The half-day workshop features perspectives from Intel on the industry transition from single-core to multicore systems, examines the current capabilities of multicore architectures including the latest Intel Core microarchitecture and provides insight into the multicore technology roadmap from Intel. The workshop also demonstrates how engineers and scientists can achieve real performance improvements by using LabVIEW graphical programming for multicore system development.
Dr James Truchard, National Instruments President, CEO and Co-founder, says: "LabVIEW simplifies multicore programming by helping users automatically map their graphical programs onto different threads to be executed on multiple cores. The LabVIEW execution system now dynamically scales the number of threads used, based on the number of processing cores available on the system and, for advanced requirements, users can directly assign sections of code to specific cores in desktop, Windows-based systems and embedded real-time systems. Attendees of our new workshop will get hands-on experience using these and other tools and techniques to discover just how easy programming multicore systems with LabVIEW can be."
Building on more than 10 years of investment in multithreading technology, LabVIEW simplifies multicore-based application development. The intuitive dataflow language of LabVIEW makes it easy for users to design parallel products and map their applications to multicore architectures for increased performance. LabVIEW also delivers symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) with the LabVIEW Real-Time environment to help realise performance gains from multicore processors without sacrificing determinism. Customers using LabVIEW to scale performance from multicore architectures successfully include the NASA Ames Research Center for wind tunnel control, Max Planck Institute for nuclear fusion research and Virginia Tech and TORC Technologies for developing autonomous vehicle vision intelligence.
Incorporate legacy code
Jim St Leger, Technology Marketing Manager for Intel's Embedded and Communications Group, says: "Intel has offered multicore processor solutions to the embedded and communications markets for more than two years and our customers are embracing the architecture of our multicore processors. LabVIEW delivers a built-in concurrency approach that simplifies multicore programming while its graphical programming model makes it possible for developers to incorporate their legacy ANSI C/C++ code into LabVIEW and get the optimal performance out of their hardware."
The Multicore Programming with NI LabVIEW Hands-On Workshop features an overview of multicore technology and its benefits, followed by hands-on sessions covering LabVIEW graphical programming basics, multithreaded programming, partitioning an application, debugging and migrating legacy applications. Attendees develop multicore applications during the training using dual-core laptops equipped with LabVIEW and the NI CompactDAQ USB-based modular data acquisition system.
National Instruments Corporation (UK) Ltd
Measurement House, Newbury Business Park
London Road
RG14 2PZ
UNITED KINGDOM
+44 (0)1635 523545
