Rapid Tomographic Image Reconstruction via Large-Scale Parallelization

Synchrotron (x-ray) light sources permit investigation of the structure of matter at extremely small length and time scales. Advances in detector technologies enable increasingly complex experiments and more rapid data acquisition. However, analysis of the resulting data then becomes a bottleneck—preventing near-real-time error detection or experiment steering. We present here methods that leverage highly parallel computers to improve the performance of iterative tomographic image reconstruction applications. We apply these methods to the conventional per-slice parallelization approach and use them to implement a novel in-slice approach that can use many more processors. To address programmability, we implement the introduced methods in high-performance MapReduce-like computing middleware, which is further optimized for reconstruction operations. Experiments with four reconstruction algorithms and two large datasets show that our methods can scale up to 8 K cores on an IBM BG/Q supercomputer with almost perfect speedup and can reduce total reconstruction times for large datasets by more than 95.4 % on 32 K cores relative to 1 K cores. Moreover, the average reconstruction times are improved from \(\sim \)2 h (256 cores) to \(\sim \)1 min (32 K cores), thus enabling near-real-time use.