Large majority of LabVIEW developers use Microsoft Windows as the development environment. However only single user Windows environments namely Windows 2000/XP/Vista are supported by National Instruments. We lately experimented installing LabVIEW 8.5 on a Windows 2003 server with multiple simultaneous users over terminal services remote desktop connections. Our initial experiences are encouraging.

Although Windows 2003 server was used for this experiment, the results can be applied to other Windows environments with multiple users as well. It can be beneficial to more carefully separate multiple users all using a single workstation with a single LabVIEW installation. more…

The clock speed of computer processors has reached the ceiling and the processor manufactures have moved from developing even faster single core processors into developing processors with increasing number of cores on a single chip. The increasing number of parallel processors is a challenge for software industry as writing parallelly executing software with mainstream programming languages is a challenging job. This dilemma is sometimes referred to as the multicore crisis.

Even though writing parallel programs with languages like C++, Java or C# is a rather complicated job, programming for parallel environments doesn’t necessarily have to be a challenge. Two programming languages both having their roots in the end of 80’s, Erlang and LabVIEW, have both been inherently concurrent from the very beginning. Both languages have started as special purpose programming languages and during the last two decades evolved into full featured general purpose programming languages. Although being both inherently concurrent languages, Erlang and LabVIEW solve the problem of concurrency in rather different ways.

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