A dedicated micro-CT beamline for the Australian Synchrotron and the Remote-CT project

A dedicated micro-CT beamline is planned for the Australian Synchrotron which will extend the synchrotron's imaging and tomography capability down to the smaller scale, incorporating phase-contrast and absorption-contrast, and an additional focussing-based mode for high-resolution. The beamline will use multi-layer mirror monochromators for enhanced flux, and will focus particularly on dynamic and high throughput studies in both monochromatic and pink-beam mode. Together with the existing Imaging and Medical beamline, this beamline will produce numerous large datasets of 10 GB or more, providing a significant data-processing challenge. The Remote-CT project addresses this by combining the MASSIVE supercomputing GPU cluster with XLI / X-TRACT software, developed at CSIRO. This software has extensive functionality for both processing and simulation of absorption and phase-contrast tomography data and has now been modified for parallel operation on a GPU cluster to take maximum advantage of the speed-up this enables.