Boston, MA. We are living with a Cambrian explosion of data, said Dave Wilson, vice president of product marketing, academic, at National Instruments, kicking off NIDays Boston Tuesday morning. We will need 5G technology to help handle this data, he said, adding that we are on a technology treadmill and can’t slow down. In fact, we have to speed up to solve the big problems of big data.
Much of the data is unstructured, he said, resulting from not only digital sources but also physical phenomena in analog form—“Big Analog Data,” as NI has termed it. NI ships millions upon millions of channels of I/O each year, he said, estimating that NI and its customers have generated 22 exabytes of data over the past three decades.
In fact, Wilson said, the physical world has infinite data with which we need to interface and provide context. Cloud-based solutions can lack context and can’t handle every application, he said. A robot, for example, doesn’t have time to consult the cloud to avoid stepping on your foot. Computation must be in the loop with interaction at the edge device—in this case, the robot’s limb.
The computer in your phone could have got you to the moon, he said, but how computing is distributed is increasingly important as we deal with a huge repository of information that can give us context. The physical world has infinite data we need to interface with, and we need data connectivity.
He then described NI’s RIO (reconfigurable I/O) architecture, which comprises analog I/O capability to interface with the infinite data of the physical world, an FPGA, a CPU, and data connectivity. The FPGA, he said, is critical to support immediate interaction with real world. The FPGA in turn can feed relevant and important information to the CPU, which can be programmed with LabVIEW.
In short, he said, RIO enables a smart-edge device to interact, compute, and connect. Put in wind turbine and the turbine becomes part of Industrial Internet of Things. Put one in a tractor and the tractor becomes part of the Industrial Internet of Things.
Wilson concluded by citing NI’s platform-based approach to design and test. “It’s an honor for us to build those platforms with your feedback,” he told attendees.
Rahul Gadkari, NI principle regional marketing manager, U.S. East, with the help of colleagues, then described several recently introduced NI products that help make smart measurements and support the design of systems that interact with real world, which I’ll describe in a future post.
