Programming with Time Using Graphical Data Flow

  • Jacob Kornerup | National Instruments

Diverse control and measurement applications, such as mobile phone testing, process optimization, and distributed sonic arrays all require precise timing and synchronization. Designers of such systems need to understand the tradeoffs between the available timing technologies before choosing the right technology. When it comes to writing the software for the system it is often the case that the programming languages and tools either treat time as a second class citizen or worse – ignore time all together.

In this talk, I will present some key timing and synchronization technologies and considerations for evaluating these. The bulk of the talk will be on the integration of time into the graphical data flow programming language LabVIEW and its development environment, and how we have extended this integration to programming both distributed and multi-core real-time systems. Finally, I will show some early results on formally verifying properties of LabVIEW programs using the ACL2 theorem prover.

Speaker Details

Jacob Kornerup is a Senior Software Engineer on the LabVIEW R&D team at National Instruments. His work has focused on representing timing and different models of computation in the LabVIEW graphical programming language. He has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to joining National Instruments, he was an assistant professor in Computer Science at Southern Methodist University.

Watch Next