Will LabVIEW take us to warp speed?

I don't know many engineers that are not fun of Star Trek. It's probably one of the first TV shows/movies where engineering had and leading role; as a matter of fact I do know a few engineers to whom Star Trek was their inspiration to became engineer.


One of the recurring topics is the propulsion, or the warp engine. It seems the engineering crew deck (and Scotty, LaForge, Be'Elanna an others) are always struggling to maintain the warp core "contained". I've always guessed that containment was some kind on magnetic field, since the exotic matter that power the different Enterprise ships might not be just put into a fuel tank.

That let me think of one application at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Garching, Germany, where researchers implemented a tokamak control system to more effectively confine plasma. Probably the most cool technology used in this application was LabVIEW's capability to leverage multiple cores present in computers to split matrix multiplication operations using a data parallelism technique on an octal-core system


LabVIEW is also bringing us closer to interact with machines using our voice (or thought). Here is an application where a wheelchair was controlled using the mind. The question is, are we going to program LabVIEW???

Enjoy!