National Instruments Joins Multicore Association

National Instruments (NI) announced it has joined The Multicore Association, a global nonprofit organization focused on developing standards that help shorten time-to-market for multicore products. NI will join Intel, Freescale Semiconductor, Wind River, and others to improve interoperability between operating systems, hardware, and software development tools. This will enable engineers to benefit from performance improvements that multicore technology offers, according to an NI release. NI will bring to the association more than 30 years of technology leadership and experience with multicore technology through products like LabVIEW. The company already incorporates multicore processors into several of its hardware offerings, including modular instruments available on PXI, PXI Express, PCI, PCI Express and PCMCIA platforms. "National Instruments has a commanding and diverse knowledge of multicore technology from a software, hardware, and operating system perspective," Markus Levy, president of The Multicore Association, said in a statement. President and CEO James Truchard noted that the company has invested 10 years in multithreading technology in LabVIEW and its parallel dataflow approach. "The change to multicore programming is as revolutionary as the transition to object-oriented programming was two decades ago," Truchard said in a statement. "We look forward to working with The Multicore Association to define the standards for multicore applications."