Phoenix LabVIEW User Group (PLUG)
Winner of the PLUG Coding Challenge 2012
Congratulations to Michael Klessens of Fujitsu for his winning submission to the 2012 PLUG Coding Challenge!
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/michael-klessens/5/404/686
Michael is a Certified LabVIEW Architect and has 12 years of LabVIEW experience. His solution was based on the simple concept of a functional global, combined with the efficiency of a variant attribute look up table. He reports his total time spent on the coding challenge was only a few hours, and he walks away with a free USB DAQ and bragging rights! Those bragging rights are well deserved, his solution was 1,077x better than the baseline solution, with a 4,481x improvement in thruput and a 75% reduction in memory consumption!
Although I did not compete in the competition, I don't mind sharing I that I also spent some time attempting to create an optimal solution and I was not able to top Michael's score. Congratulations Michael and thank you for your participation in this year's coding challenge!
Thank you also to Ryan Griffin of Orbital Sciences for your submission to the 2012 PLUG Coding Challenge!
Ryan is also a Certified LabVIEW Architect with 10 years of LabVIEW experience. Ryan's solution utilized an array of DVRs, a variant attribute lookup, and global variables in attempt to achieve maximum parallelism with minimal data duplication. His solution was 68x better than the baseline solution. Ryan and I feel his performance difference compared to Michael's solution was probably the use of global variables instead of a functional global to store the array of DVRs and VAT. Plus, returning the value of a DVR has an inherent data locking and data copy involved, which may also have impacted thruput. He reports he spent about 6 hrs trying various implementations.
In either case, his solution was still 68x better than the baseline, and I appreciate the time and mental energy he applied to the problem. Thank you Ryan!
Thank you both for submissions, and others who showed interest. Next year I hope we'll have greater participation. Coding challenges are a great way to learn from other people, and as Michael and Ryan attest, doesn't necessarily take a lot of personal time to complete. If you have any ideas for the next Coding Challenge or motivating prizes, please reply to this post or email nate@themoehrings.com.
Thanks!
