I have to buy a new computer for data acquisition and analysis.

[Just_Starting]

My apologies if the this question is 1) to basic or obvious 2) in the wrong place 3) etc. but I am pretty unfamiliar with windows computers and I am looking to upgrade.

I am using a PCI 6220M with a SCB-68 break out box to acquire voltage from a gas analyzers, thermocouples, and pressure transducers for physiology experiments and writing to a WDT file. I am running Labview 8.5 (developer env.) but may soon upgrade to Labview 2010. On the analysis side I am using Labview for peak detection and thus get frequency, amplitude and DC average where needed. In the future I will be writing software possibly for image acquisition and definitely for image analysis in keying behavioral/visual events. The aquisition files I generate are quiet large, so I would like to get a as fast a computer as possible.

So here are a few questions that I have. My understanding is that a 64bit system will allow for greater RAM addressing above 4GB. Can Labview 8.5 (with vision 8.6) take advantage of that extra ram for reading in files. Isn't 8.5 32bit and limited? Are there any issues with Labview 8.5 not functioning if it is addressed to RAM above the 4GB limit? I have had this problem with some older DNA sequence analysis software.

Is there any advantage to a quad core processor over a dual core processor. Can Labview take advantage of the extra cores, or would resources towards a faster dual core be better.

Sorry again if these are simple questions, but my knowledge here is limited. Any advice towards purchasing a computer that can be useful for both 8.5 and an eventual upgrade to 2010 would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

[Brad_K]

Hi Just_Starting,

National Instruments Product Compatibility for Microsoft Windows 7 may have some of the information you're looking for. The PCI-6220 is compatible with 64-bit Windows 7/Vista and both 32-bit and 64-bit LabVIEW, assuming you have a recent version of NI-DAQmx.

LabVIEW 8.5 was 32-bit only (unlike LabVIEW 2009 and later), but if I recall correctly, 8.5 was the first version of LabVIEW that was "large address aware". This means that on 64-bit Windows it can use 4 GB of virtual address space instead of the standard 2 GB. If you try to use more than 4 GB of virtual address space, memory allocations will fail, resulting in errors.

LabVIEW can take advantage of more cores, but whether it actually does so depends on your application and the libraries it uses.

I'll leave the vision aspect for someone else to answer, since I don't know much about it.

Brad

[Steve.J]

Hi Just_Starting,

Great to see another customer in the life sciences!  Please visit our NI Biomedical User Community at www.ni.com/biomedusers for links, discussion forum, and other resources for LabVIEW users in the biosciences.  You can also find information on this site about our free Biomedical Starter Kit, which includes sample programs, VI's for file format conversion to popular industry formats, and tools for image and signal processing.

Steve

[rpursley8]

I would upgrade as soon as you can to take advantage of the 64-bit version.  I have a couple imaging applications that barely ran on the 32-bit version that run great using the 64-bit.  I had the same problem as you, my image sizes were rather large and LabVIEW had problems finding enough free contiguous memory to allocate to them in the 32-bit version.

The later versions (2009 & 2010) also have some features that allow you to fully utilize multicore processors easier.

[Just_Starting]

Thanks for the help. I made the changes but the file size did not change. Worth a try through. 

[Izzzzz]

Hello Just_Starting, 

Could you clarify how you expect the file size to change? I believe suggesting the use of a 64 bit system was to take advantage of the greater memory allocation to process the large image sizes. 

Regards, 

Izzy O.

Applications Engineer

National Instruments 

ni.com/support