National Instruments Delivers Windows 7 Support for Engineers and Scientists

NI Tools Integrate with Windows 7 for Faster Performance and Higher Throughput with USB Data Acquisition Devices and Multicore Systems

National Instruments today announced software and hardware compatibility with Windows 7, the latest operating system from Microsoft, to help engineers and scientists attain faster performance and higher throughput within their applications. Engineers and scientists who are considering upgrading to the latest computer hardware can take advantage of several new features in the new operating system. This release, which includes performance and usability enhancements, provides a smooth upgrade experience and improves the environment for hardware and software compatibility, making it ideal for measurement and workstation applications. Windows 7 contains features that provide increased USB data acquisition throughput and take full advantage of multicore processors to improve responsiveness and offer compatibility with the latest computer technologies, including support for PCI Express and 64-bit processors.

"Next-generation measurement systems need to have high throughput and fast performance, as engineers and scientists look for new ways to meet constantly increasing demands for speed in their applications," said Jane Boulware, general manager of U.S. Windows Client at Microsoft. "The benchmarks provided by National Instruments with Windows 7 show engineers an effective method for tackling this issue."

Increased USB Throughput

By combining Windows 7 with the LabVIEW graphical design platform for test, control and embedded system development, engineers and scientists can achieve efficiency gains including elimination of non-necessary timers, selective hub suspension and lower enumeration time for USB flash devices, which increase the performance of USB test and measurement devices. In recent benchmarks of the new NI CompactDAQ chassis with LabVIEW, engineers observed a 10 percent increase in overall attainable bandwidth in Windows 7 as compared to the same hardware running on Windows XP. The increased hardware performance combined with the multicore optimization of both the Windows 7 operating system and the LabVIEW development environment result in a performance increase of up to 20 percent when performing high-speed or multifunction I/O measurements.

To take advantage of these performance increases, engineers may need to install new drivers. Drivers compatible with Windows 7 are available for download from National Instruments at www.ni.com/windows7.

Improved Multicore Use and Multitasking Capability

Data acquisition applications written in LabVIEW and using NI hardware on a multicore computer will benefit from the improvements in Windows 7 designed to further optimize the use of these processors. LabVIEW is an inherently multithreaded software platform that assigns independent, asynchronous processes to separate threads that can be executed in parallel by separate computer cores. LabVIEW programmers can create multiple computationally intensive tasks in a single application to run in parallel and optimize the use of all available cores. Engineers and scientists can use NI drivers such as NI-DAQmx, which are also multithreaded, to efficiently create high-performance acquisition and analysis applications, without having to manually spawn and manage separate threads. A benchmark LabVIEW application with four parallel loops on a quad-core machine executes up to 8 percent faster in Windows 7, compared to Windows XP. Additionally, an NI TestStand parallel sequence benchmark application executes up to 10 percent faster.

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