Newsletter: Building Real-Time, High-Performance Computing Systems with PXI

 8/24/2011
IN THIS ISSUE
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From Bob Helsel, Editor of the PXI Newsletter:

  

Welcome to the August edition of the PXI Newsletter.  Our intent is to educate and inform you about how the PXI standard is being used in modular test systems for a wide variety of industries.

The PXI Express Software Specification was created to provide a standard for software support of the new features introduced by the PXI Express Hardware Specification.  The software specification’s purposes are to describe the capabilities of PXI Express hardware components using standard hardware description files and to promote interoperability among PXI Express vendors with respect to software requirements. The software specification addresses a variety of issues, including hardware description, hardware resource management, operating system framework definition, and the incorporation of existing instrumentation software standards.

The PXI Express Software Specification has three objectives:

  1. To define a set of software interfaces for characterizing PXI Express components and their capabilities.
  2. To be compatible with previous PXI software specifications.
  3. To define standard operating system frameworks and to incorporate existing instrumentation software standards.

Our main article this month, Building Real-Time, High-Performance Computing Systems with PXI, addresses the need for a scalable, high-performance computing model tied directly to I/O. In the New PXI Products section, we are showcasing PXI products recently released by members of the PXI Systems Alliance.

Thanks to Agilent Technologies, our sponsor for this month's issue.

Visit http://www.pxisa.org for more information.

Agilent sponsor

PXI apps
Main Article

Building Real-Time, High-Performance
Computing Systems with PXI

By Chetan Kapoor,
Group Manager for PXI Platform Products
National Instruments

As science and industry continue to push the limits of the single-processor computing system for test, measurement, and control systems, the need for a scalable, high-performance computing model tied directly to I/O is emerging. These applications, from signal processing, such as SAR and SIGINT, to advanced modeling and simulation, such as real-time hardware-in-the-loop test, continue to require more and more computational resources. More importantly, in addition to requiring intensive data processing, these applications require the data processing to occur in line with the actual data flow. Storing the data offline and postprocessing it is often unacceptable.

These applications’ typical loop rates are in the kilohertz range, which translates to loop times of less than one millisecond. This seemingly simple need to have a closed-loop system with loop rates equal to or greater than 1 KHz imposes stringent requirements on all of the system components. The overall loop time can be broken down into the time required to perform each of the following:
  • Digitize or synthesize the physical signal
  • Exchange the digital data from the computing element
  • Process the digital data stream
  • Present or visualize the processed results or record the raw data stream

Read more >>
 

Thanks to all our readers.
Bob Helsel, Editor
www.pxisa.org
New PXI Products

The PXI platform continues its explosive growth with many new product introductions. New products introduced in the last three months include (listed in the order received):

MAC Panel SCOUT Solution
for NI FlexRIO

The MAC Panel SCOUT Solution is the first mass interconnect solution specifically engineered to compliment the growing range of NI FlexRIO products.

Agilent M9216A PXI 32-channel High Voltage Data Acquisition

The M9216A is a high voltage data acquisition module that allows simultaneous measurement of eight channels of positive voltages ranging from 1 mV to 100 V.

NI PXIe-5665 14 GHz RF Vector Signal Analyzer

National Instruments extends leading PXI RF test performance to 14 GHz.

Teradyne High Speed Subsystem (HSSub) for Emerging Bus Test Requirements

The Teradyne High Speed Subsystem (HSSub) addresses the requirements of digital buses operating at speeds into the gigabits per second as well as the need for extremely fast interaction between the ATE and the unit-under-test.

Read more >>
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PO Box 1016; Niwot, CO 80544