The Hil Street Journal

Geek Fest!

Incase you were wondering why I haven't been posting ... e-mailing ... calling ...

Here's why I am so busy ... the "Geek Fest" begins!

National Instruments uses "geek fest" to show off, improve its products
By Dan Zehr
AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Monday, August 06, 2007

Even longtime employees at National Instruments Corp. give a chuckle when they talk about the raucous reception their work gets at NI Week.

Every year, the company uses its annual conference as a stage for its latest and greatest products. And every year, the thousands of researchers and engineers who crowd the hall react with wild applause.

Co-founder and chief executive James Truchard gets the biggest reaction, but the employees who work on new products and upgrades soak it in as much as anyone. As Eric Stark-loff, director of product marketing and witness to every NI Week in the past decade, recently said: "It's this geek fest we're pretty proud of."

So when the cheers start Tuesday through Thursday at the Austin Convention Center, Omid Sojoodi and Aljosa Vrancic might be tempted to take a quick bow. They managed development for the latest version of National Instruments' flagship LabView software, which the company plans to announce today.

National Instruments' products are used widely by engineers, scientists and researchers, who employ the software to design, run and measure all kinds of programs — everything from radio-frequency tests on cell phones to a recent test of shutters on a new space telescope NASA is building. The same products have played a role in creating many everyday items.

LabView is a vital piece of what National Instruments does, and the major updates the company issues about once a year help drive profitable software sales. And because NI Week brings together a large group of LabView's most loyal users, Sojoodi, a senior group manager, and Vrancic, a principal engineer, use it to get feedback on what they've done and what they might do next.

"We'll have closed-door sessions with our power users and talk about some of our products in development," Sojoodi said. "We target our power users, and they really help shape some of the more specific features we add."

New features in this latest version will bring the hardware up to speed with the changing computer platforms on which it runs, particularly the growing adoption of multicore processors. The new chip technology puts several processing brains, or cores, on a single piece of silicon, which allows the computer to divide and conquer large tasks or simultaneously run smaller jobs.
The newer processors, and how National Instruments' products will take advantage of them, will be key topics at NI Week, Truchard said on a call with analysts last month.

Multicore processors already suit LabView well. LabView has been "multithreaded" for years, meaning its jobs can be split into separate threads, processed at the same time and woven back together afterward.

That means LabView users automatically get a performance boost when they move from traditional processors to multicore chips, Sojoodi said, "but with the release we gave more control to people who want to go in and specially make changes to take advantage of this hardware."

One key change will give users the ability to define which tasks should run on each core. For most tasks, that happens automatically. For example, a home computer user running the Windows operating system would see little difference between a traditional processor and a dual-core processor.

But for the highly technical applications many LabView users deal with, some tasks take on much greater importance than others. The new upgrade will allow users to assign a critical job to its own core, so the vital process runs uninterrupted by other calculations.

Some users might be perfectly happy with the automatic division of tasks between cores, Sojoodi said, "but in this particular case they might want to run this piece of code on core four. It gives them more control on where this code will run."

National Instruments is taking this idea even further with an expanding push into chips that users can customize and run at higher speeds. Using LabView, these field-programmable gate arrays, or FPGAs, can be designed for specific high-performance tasks.

A prime example is the CERN Large Hadron Collider under construction hundreds of feet below ground in Switzerland and France. A global consortium of physicists is building the next-generation particle collider to conduct research they hope will unlock some of the deepest secrets of the universe.

Starting in 2008, they'll send beams of particles at super-high speeds around the 17-mile circle, smashing the beams together and analyzing the subatomic debris that results.

National Instruments is working with the team to build a system that can both control the particle beam and measure the results of the collisions, said Kamran Shah, manager of LabView marketing.

Controlling and measuring particles that move around the speed of light takes some quick gear.

Those high-end jobs continue to attract National Instruments' developers, and probably always will.

"The improved hardware and software capabilities are allowing National Instruments to push further into areas that once were the domain of the high-end guys like Agilent," said Antonio Antezano, an analyst at Bear Stearns & Co. Inc.

The company has started pushing more into radio-frequency testing, for example. Rivals such as Agilent will continue developing new abilities as well, Antezano said. But by capitalizing on hardware and software updates, National Instruments can push itself up into higher-end applications.

"Now they're more direct competition with Agilent, where before they were more focused on broad general applications," Antezano said. "With the performance in hardware improving, they will be able to push further into that high end."

That's not to say the company will move beyond the bulk of its customers.

The company's success has grown from its ability to make programming quick and easy for just about anyone who wants to keep their focus on research and development.

"We're targeting non-programmers with LabView, and we're certainly trying to make it easy," Sojoodi said. "Over the years, that has become more of a philosophy for us: Make it easy to use for engineers and researchers so they don't have to get bogged down in programming."

The idea isn't to transform easy tasks into simple ones, he said, quoting National Instruments' co-founder Jeff Kodosky. The idea is to take prohibitively challenging tasks and make them possible.

The company's success at accomplishing that has generated a lot of loyal customers, and it's at the heart of all the cheers that rain down each year at NI Week. In the weeks leading up to the conference, registration again was rolling above last year, and National Instruments was expecting another record crowd.

Scott Jordan will be one of the more than 2,000 people expected to come to Austin for NI Week. He's director of nanopositioning at Physik Instrumente-USA and one of National Instruments' earliest customers.

Jordan will head a panel called "Breakthrough Innovation" on Wednesday, discussing different ways people have applied National Instruments' technologies. Those sort of interactions make NI Week an annual stop, he said.

"There's a chance to interact, to collide and to collude with your fellow LabView users, and that's huge," he said. "There's nothing like that anywhere else in the industry."

posted by A Spirited Mom @ 9:11 AM