Labview 8.5 is the latest version of National Instruments’ graphical system design platform for test, control and embedded system development. Building on nearly 10 years of investment in multithreading technology, Labview 8.5 is claimed to significantly reduce the programming complexity commonly associated with sophisticated control systems based on multicore and FPGA (field-programmable gate array) architectures. With the parallel dataflow language of Labview, engineers can balance several measurement and control tasks between the multiple processor cores available on today’s standard PC platforms. For added performance and reliability, Labview 8.5 offers deterministic, real-time multicore tools, new machine monitoring functions for both desktop and FPGA platforms, and expanded OPC connectivity to hundreds of industrial devices.

Designers of industrial machines, robotics, mechatronic systems and industrial control applications can see performance gains from multicore technology by balancing parallel tasks, such as control loops, measurements and industrial communication, among multiple processing cores. Unlike sequential, text-based programming tools, the parallel dataflow language of Labview with built-in multithreading naturally divides tasks across multiple processors. The latest version of Labview delivers performance gains with deterministic real-time multithreading, improved thread-safe I/O drivers and automatic scaling based on the total available number of processing cores.

For prototyping and deploying deterministic and reliable industrial machines, Labview 8.5 extends the performance of multicore applications to real-time embedded systems with symmetric multiprocessing in Labview Real-Time. Engineers can 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 challenging debugging and code optimisation requirements of real-time multicore development, the new NI Real-Time Execution Trace Toolkit 2.0 visually displays timing relationships between sections of code and the individual threads, as well as processing cores where the code is executing.

For more information, visit www.ni.com/uk/labview