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The company Kithara Software announces an improvement of their real-time extension »RealTime Suite« 2011, which takes the trend towards multiple parallel running CPU cores into account. It allows the parallel execution of real-time tasks and the assignment of them to different CPU cores.
PC-based automation provides diverse benefits, which are not only lie in the fact, that the visualization of a machine or equipment can be comfortably implemented—especially using Windows as the operating system. Automation, robotics, industrial image processing and test benches in most cases need complex calculations and therefore a powerful PC. For historical reasons, in many machines and test benches even today more than one computer is used, although this is not necessary anymore due to the increased performance of today’s PCs.
The »RealTime Suite« 2011 allows for the execution of all automation tasks on one single PC by assigning them to the different CPU cores. Unused processor time of every core remains free for Windows usage. Additionally, in a future version some cores can be assigned to real-time tasks only.
The development of applications takes place comfortably in C/C++ or Delphi. When the time-critical program parts are outhoused into a DLL, developers can also use .NET languages like C#.
This approach not only saves considerable amount of development effort due to the simpler communication between the application and the real-time part, but it also benefits the aspect of sparing resources, because only one computer is necessary for one facility. This allows for “Green Automation” even for special machines and test benches.