NIWeek focuses on time

National Instruments’ annual NIWeek event began Tuesday morning with Dr. James Truchard, president and CEO, addressing what he called a record-setting attendance, with registrants numbering nearly 3000. The focus of this week’s event, he said in his opening keynote address, is time—specifically, the time it takes to innovate, integrate, and build powerful systems.

The key product introduction representing the event’s focus on time is LabView 2010. NI officials have long positioned the high-level graphical programming tool as a time-saver for domain experts looking to quickly develop embedded systems. And while that positioning remains in effect, the key focus in bringing LabView 2010 to market has been on compiler architecture improvements that improve run-time execution speed of compiled LabView programs. At a press conference formally announcing the 2010 release, John Pasquarette, VP of product marketing for software, said that, compared with LabView 2009, programs compiled using LabView 2010 will run about 20% faster on average, with execution of some functions, such as parallel for loops, occurring nearly 200% faster.

Despite the run-time execution-speed improvements in LabView 2010, Truchard throughout his keynote address emphasized development-time savings as well. He cited a recent Time feature on Thomas Edison, noting that Edison touted a minor invention every day and a major invention every six months. With Edison as inspiration, Truchard said, NI and its customers and partners outpace Edison’s innovation pace, enabling an ecosystem of innovation. He told attendees, “You are the inventors of our time.”

Truchard said the “ecosystem of innovation” rests on the foundation of Moore’s law-which has unleashed the processing power that has enabled NI and its customers to pursue such projects as zero-footprint ATE systems, smart-grid analyzers, and oil leak detection systems. Noting the importance of this last category, he said that in the Gulf of Mexico, clearly there had been insufficient monitoring and analysis. That point resonated, as he was speaking on the day when the Wall Street Journal ran an article headlined “Spill Uncorked 4.9 Million Barrels,” which recounted wildly inaccurate initial estimates of the amount of oil gushing from the damaged well.

Commenting again on Moore’s law, Truchard concluded, “Intel assures us it has years to go, enabling us to do more at lower cost and power.”