SAN JOSE, Calif. — James Truchard thinks he may have one of the keys to the multicore era.
The chief executive of National Instruments believes the company's flagship LabView environment offers many of the tools parallel programmers need today. NI has plugged into parallel research efforts at Intel Corp. and Berkeley to make sure LabView evolves with the times.
"We got a little lucky in developing in an area for the last 20 years that turned out to be pretty vital for multicore," said Truchard on a stop at NI's Silicon Valley office. "From day one, LabView took a structured dataflow approach," he added.
That approach helps ease the job of handling synchronization, a thorny problem in parallel systems. The graphical interface and automated tools in LabView smooth the path for many users who lack programming expertise.
LabView can automate the assignment of jobs to different cores and threads. It also can generate C code and offers tools to manually optimize CPU loading, debugging and the use of cache in multicore chips.
The program was originally developed by NI co-founder Jeff Kodosky some 20 years ago as a graphical programming tool for the Apple Macintosh. It has gone through a number of iterations since that time, moving to the x86, adding support for multithreading in 1998 and FPGAs in 2003. LabView added multicore support for the x86 in its latest release, version 8.5 released last August.
"We initially invented LabView to create a nice programming tool, and now we can do implementations of multicore designs with it," said Truchard.
The feature is a timely one given programmers are struggling with the new parallelism. Even Intel which is only at a quad-core stage so far has gone through one major revision of its approach to multithreading and has needed to develop some itself of the basic parallel software infrastructure its chips need.
"This is going to be pretty painful for people," said Truchard. "Today's programming languages really weren't developed for parallel programming" and the new mechanisms Intel and others are developing to plug the holes "add a lot of complexity to the programming environment," he said.
NI hopes the visual programming environment of LabView eases the pain, and in some cases it has.
"We've been able to bring FPGA programming to mechanical engineers and medical doctors who could not do it any other way," Truchard said.
The tools have been employed by a wide range of users to simplify jobs such as generating multiprocessing code for a NASA wind tunnel system and controlling a European telescope with thousands of mirrors, each moved by multiple actuators.
Dirk De Mol, an NI principal architect, joined the company after successfully applying LabView to automatically spread a serial program across a set of four-way servers. "This was done by control engineers not computer science specialists," De Mol said.
Truchard notes that high school students in the annual First Robotics contest used LabView to program FPGAs. Last year NI set up a lab at Berkeley so students there could use its tools to prototype embedded system designs.
The program is one of several at NI aimed at keeping LabView in the forefront of parallel programming research, currently one of the hottest topics in computer science, thanks to the move to multicore processors.
"Because we already have a language that works, they can use it as a vehicle to test ideas for new architectures in the operating system and the hardware," said Truchard.
"We hope LabView can become part of the next generation parallel programming tool set," added De Mol.
