NIWeek 2010 shows how NI gives engineers their time back

AUSTIN, USA, NIWeek: Executives from National Instruments discussed how NI products are supporting innovation during the 16th annual NIWeek graphical system design conference and exhibition.

Speaking to a record crowd of more than 3,000 engineers and scientists, NI executives and engineers demonstrated new products and technologies that help innovators increase efficiency and productivity while reducing costs.

Dr. James Truchard, NI president, CEO and cofounder, opened NIWeek 2010 by discussing how NI is taking advantage of computer-based technologies and Moore's Law to deliver a unique ecosystem of highly integrated software and hardware that increases performance while decreasing cost, complexity and the time spent getting solutions to market.

He explained how the well-integrated architecture of tools such as NI LabVIEW graphical system design software and NI CompactRIO modular instrumentation delivers the efficiency customers need so they have more time to create real solutions that address the world's engineering challenges.

"With the integration that we create with LabVIEW and other tools across multicore and distributed systems, we can make ever more powerful systems, integrating hardware and software," Truchard said. "This is all about system-level design making a platform that increases the efficiency and productivity of engineers' designs, so small teams can do a lot more."

Following Truchard, John Graff, NI vice president of Americas, sales and marketing, hosted NI engineers on stage to demonstrate how new NI products are paving the way for efficient, long-term innovation. These products include LabVIEW 2010 with its optimized compiler, the industry's first vector network analyzer available in a compact PXI form factor, high-performance data acquisition hardware, optical sensing instrumentation and several others.

NI engineers showed how these products address advanced demands, expanding the variety of solutions that NI delivers for test, embedded and industrial applications.

To illustrate how NI continues to help customers advance the state of the art in technology, John Pasquarette, NI vice president of software marketing, along with NI R&D developers, began the second day of the conference with previews of several current and forthcoming NI technologies.

Engineers demonstrated in-development projects including product concepts for using mobile devices and cloud computing technologies for real-time, distributed data acquisition. The team also demonstrated the new LabVIEW FPGA Compile Farm Toolkit and LabVIEW FPGA Cloud Compile Service Beta, which will make it possible for engineers to assign field-programmable gate array (FPGA) compiling tasks to remote servers. Other demonstrations showed new driver technologies for facilitating hardware support across multiple operating systems including Mac and Linux, advanced RF measurement technology and a PXI multichassis communication protocol for high-performance computing.

Jeff Kodosky, NI business and technology fellow, cofounder and "father of LabVIEW," followed Pasquarette by discussing the past, present and future of the role of time in computation and programming languages. He detailed the challenges today's computer scientists face with synchronizing software and hardware in real time, and the solutions that new LabVIEW compiler technology can provide for advancing real-time computation and future innovation.

On the last day of the conference, Ray Almgren, NI vice president of marketing for core platforms, demonstrated how today's students are driving the future of technology with NI products. He then invited university student teams to demonstrate how they are using NI technology to improve the world.

Members of the Racing Green Endurance team from Imperial College of London showed how they quickly prototyped and deployed an electric car, which can drive 350 miles on a single charge, within eight months using LabVIEW and CompactRIO. Almgren then introduced the Virginia Tech Blind Driver Challenge team, demonstrating a car that the blind can drive, which they prototyped in just four months using NI products.

Dr. Michio Kaku, theoretical physicist, author, professor and host of numerous scientific documentaries, closed NIWeek 2010 with informed projections about the future of science, technology and innovation. He explained how with Moore's Law doubling computer power every 18 months, innovation is happening faster than ever.

In addition to detailing numerous emerging technologies that will drive the future, he discussed how NI is helping advance those technologies. With examples such as NI involvement in the CERN Large Hadron Collider and ITER fusion projects, he declared that, "NI has set the gold standard for data processing."