Rapid CT reconstruction on GPU-enabled HPC clusters

Abstract

Computed Tomography (CT) reconstruction is a computationally and data-intensive process applied across many fields of scientific endeavor, including medical and materials science, as a noninvasive imaging technique. A typical CT dataset obtained with a CCD-based X-ray detector, such as that at the Australian Synchrotron with 4K×4K pixels captured over multiple-view angles, is in the order of 128GB. The reconstructed output volume is in the order 256GB. CT data sizes increase at 1.5 times the number of pixels in the detector, while the data-processing load generally increases as the square of the number of pixels, hence data storage, management and throughput capabilities become paramount. Fr..