Mathscript Questions

[Gary Rubin]

Hi all,

I was just reading the NI pages about Mathscript, but still have some questions. I am looking at a project in which I'll want to take advantage of some of Matlab's volumetric plotting capabilities. I was planning on doing this all in Matlab, but have begun to consider whether LV8.20's Mathscript would allow me to do what I want solely in Labview.

Now for the questions:

How does LV's native multithreading work with Mathscript? I'm thinking that this will be running on a multi-core processor; if I have two Mathscript nodes running in parallel, will the load be split between the two cores, as I would expect for "standard" Labview functions? This would be one of my main reasons for doing the Labview-based solution, as Matlab does not easily support multithreading.

Also, in searching LAVA for info on Mathscript, I found this from bsvingen:

Instead this MathScript nodes are developed, nodes that are quite useless in a normal LV program due to verty slow execution speed and copiling speed.

Just how bad is the performance? Am I going to lose any benefit of multithreading due to the inefficiencies that bsvingen alluded to? My particularly application will not be very calculation intensive, but will be pretty memory intensive.

Thanks,

Gary

[LAVA 1.0 Content]

I'll share my limited experience:

NI has a Mathscript forum at http://forums.ni.com/ni/board?board.id=MathScript that has some qood answers about what you can and can't do. The multithreading and parallelism questions would likely be answered quickly by the Mathscript team if posted there.

File I/O and UI Mathscript functions are limited or missing; you will need to use LabVIEW to source the input data and present the results. (your interest in Matlab volumetric plotting may be an issue) Again, I think you would get a good answer from the NI forum on that. (edit: This applies to runtime more than the development environment.)

I was warned that Mathscript Nodes that exceed several dozen lines will not perform well. The suggestion was to break the scripts into separate nodes and wire then together.

[Gary Rubin]

NI has a Mathscript forum at http://forums.ni.com/ni/board?board.id=MathScript that has some qood answers about what you can and can't do. The multithreading and parallelism questions would likely be answered quickly by the Mathscript team if posted there.

Thanks for the information, and the link. I wonder if I should be considering Matlab script nodes as well. Well, at least I have multiple options to choose from...

Thanks,

Gary