[Insight-developers] CUDA ITK

[Rupert Brooks]

Hi Philip,

I think you sent this email a while ago, but i never saw any response.
 Probably everyone got overloaded with the holiday season and it
slipped through the cracks.  Thats my excuse anyway.

I'm not currently working with ITK much, but i am doing CUDA
development in other contexts, and it has crossed my mind more than
once that it would be an ideal platform for a lot of medical image
processing algorithms, in particular, some parts of ITK.
Unfortunately, i would have little time at the moment to offer any
collaborations, but  I'll be very interested to see your code when it
comes out.  What are your thoughts on the software management issues -
in particular, once you have created this set of code that performs a
similar set of functions to what is in ITK, how will you (or will you)
keep it up to date with the ITK code base as it evolves.

I would also be curious if you had considered doing the development in
OpenCL.  OpenCL seems to possibly have more long term potential, and
from what i have read of it, its stream processing model seems to be
abstracted a bit more cleanly.    However, i havent actually developed
anything in OpenCL yet, so these are merely impressions on my part.

Cheers, and good luck
Rupert B.


--------------------------------------------------------------
Rupert Brooks
rupert.brooks at gmail.com




On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 00:00, Philip Ward <pward at vpac.org> wrote:
> Dear Developers,
>
> My apologies if my protocol is incorrect in using this list, I am a first time user.
>
> A development team, including myself, from VPAC in Melbourne Australia (www.vpac.org) are currently working on porting some of the ITK to CUDA. One of the reasons for doing this is VPAC manage many clusters, including a Tesla cluster, and some of our clients use ITK. As part of our preliminary research I would like to know if any developers are currently porting to CUDA so that we can avoid any doubling up and wasted effort. We are open to collaboration and will be releasing our code sometime in late February 2010.
>
> Our current tactic is to write a memory management class to wrap around the itkImportImageContainer. This will be used to further increase performance when multiple GPU filters are used in sequence. It will also allow us to give full compatibility with existing CPU filters. The drawback of using GPU's is the overhead of copying memory to and from the device, so gains on particular filters may be lost due to memory transfers to accommodate existing CPU filters. This will be investigated further during our testing.
>
> I am happy and open to discuss any matters relating to this so do not hesitate to email me. I will be putting up a detailed plan of our initial architecture online soon if anyone would like to view it.
>
> Regards,
> Phillip Ward
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