National Instruments Corp. in Austin, Texas, is releasing LabVIEW 8, an upgrade to the company’s graphical development platform for design, control, and test, by introducing distributed intelligence-a suite of capabilities for engineers and scientists to design, distribute, and synchronize intelligent devices and systems. LabVIEW 8 also features a project-based environment for developing and managing large-scale applications. The release also updates the LabVIEW Real-Time Module, LabVIEW FPGA Module, LabVIEW PDA Module and LabVIEW Datalogging and Supervisory Control Module. LabVIEW 8 extends graphical programming further into test and control systems, from rack-and-stack test solutions to automation plant networks, with new flexible and easy-to-use distributed communication and control tools by simplifying its interface for communicating with and synchronizing between remote intelligent devices and systems, such as real-time processors and FPGAs. Embedded designers, test engineers and control-system engineers can use the same graphical platform for simple data transfer, deterministic real-time communication, and network synchronization with integrated alarms, events and data logging. For more information contact National Instruments online at www.ni.com.