Peeking into the Future - NIWeek Day 2 Keynote Recap

[Dave Brown]

Yesterday Dr. Truchard brought up Moore's Law to mention how NI is taking advantage of the principle to provide innovative solutions for engineers who need to do more with less.

Today, John Pasquarette, NI VP of software marketing, moved forward with that idea and showed attendees additional proof of how Moore's Law really is, in Truchard's words, "the wind behind our backs." Along with new R&D VP Phil Hester and a team of NI R&D developers from around the world, Pasquarette gave us a sneak peek at numerous forthcoming NI innovations. The team demonstrated some highly advanced technologies that are still in the works, many of which target RF, wireless, and Cloud computing, including:

• Applications and tools that use the Web, RF and wireless to turn the iPhone, iPad and other mobile devices into real-time, industrial-strength data acquisition and control devices.
• New apps for both iOS and Android available at ni.com/smartphone
• NI LabVIEW Web UI Builder, which is based on Microsoft Silverlight, runs in the Cloud  via a no-install browser to let you read live data via the Web
• An FPGA Compile Farm, which will help FPGA engineers compile on several Cloud servers instead of one in-house PC
• The LabVIEW FPGA Compile Cloud Service (Beta for 2010), which is being built on Windows Azure
• A new low-noise RF vector signal analyzer

Other in-progress projects include a Real-Time Hypervisor for Linux and FPGA Interface C API for Linux  to help run Windows, Mac OS and Linux simultaneously on one system. There's also the impressive PXImc multi chassis communication protocol for high-performance computing, which is being implemented to control adaptive optics in the massive European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT).

Following Pasquarette came the Father of LabVIEW himself, Jeff Kodosky, who with nearly every brilliant word made most of us in the room drop our jaws in awe. He detailed the past, present and future of the role of time in programming languages. He discussed how integrating true, real time into programming is the state-of-the-art challenge in computational science, and detailed how LabVIEW developers are taking advantage of the latest, in-research programming language functions to push the boundaries of programming. Kodosky ended by emphasizing how LabVIEW is the most flexible, powerful programming environment that can drive programming, software, and innovation in general into the future.

So it was a day of learning what the future holds. We may not have had Tesla coils spewing lighting like yesterday's keynote (which I neglected to mention in my previous re-cap post), but we got a glimpse of some very impressive technologies that promise to shape the nature of innovation for years to come.