LabVIEW and Giant Telescopes

For those of you who think the whole “LabVIEW is great for multicore programming” story is a bunch of hype, you need to check this out…

But first, a short digression.  One of the coolest (and more frustrating) things about working on LabVIEW is the fact that it can be used to solve so many different applications.  Big or small, test, design, or control – LabVIEW again and again comes up in the most incredible places.  When you find yourself talking with an NI person about LabVIEW, you quickly get the feeling that LabVIEW is “all things for all people” – which of course breaks every rule of marketing and product positioning.  But the reality is, you can use LabVIEW for a lot more applications than you think.  Our long legacy of test, measurement, and data acquisition sometimes gets in the way of people realizing that LabVIEW is a potential solution for other app areas.

One such area is advanced, high-speed control.  LabVIEW is uniquely positioned to combine advanced algorithms with best-in-the-world I/O capabilities.  Combine these algorithms with the parallel/multicore capabilities of the LabVIEW programming language – and you’ve got some real power.  

But rather than read about it, take a look at this YouTube video from Darren Schmidt – one of our math and analysis algorithm experts.   Darren has been toying around with running LabVIEW algorithms on an Nvidia Cuda GPU (stay tuned for some libraries coming soon on NI Labs), and in the process has gotten himself and team plugged into a large telescope application.   This video was shot at the Super Computing Conference, where LabVIEW was a finalist for the Supercomputing Analytics Challenge.