The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing
July 13, 2007
Star-P Software Enables High-Definition Ultrasound
1 | 2 All »
WALTHAM, Mass., July 10 -- Biomedical engineers at the University of Virginia (U.Va.) School of Engineering and Applied Science have developed a new imaging tool that hopes to dramatically improve medical ultrasounds, potentially leading to more accurate and timely diagnoses of breast cancer and other life threatening conditions.
Using Star-P software from Interactive Supercomputing, the University's biomedical engineering research team, led by Associate Professor William F. Walker, created an advanced beamforming algorithm -- called the Time-domain Optimized Near-field Estimator (TONE) -- which significantly improves the contrast and resolution of ultrasound images.
"The potential applications for this algorithm are almost infinite," said James H. Aylor, dean of U.Va.'s School of Engineering and Applied Science. "Not only can it be used in the medical community to benefit patients nationwide, it will have applications in the fields of radio astronomy, seismology and more."
While conventional beamforming algorithms have been used in ultrasound scanners for nearly a half century, they typically result in degraded images that are blurry or cluttered. The culprit: off-axis signals, or the sound wave reflections coming from undesired locations within the organ or tissue.
The TONE algorithm reduces undesired off-axis signals, resulting in much higher definition images, but at the price of a much greater computational load. The algorithm developed on desktop computers overwhelmed the computer's processing ability. The team solved this problem by automatically parallelizing their algorithms with Star-P to run on a powerful, memory-rich IBM Linux cluster.
"We were not able to generate images with such a fine sampling pitch until we used Star-P," said Research Associate Francesco Viola. "It takes a huge amount of memory and computational resources to execute the algorithm. Typical resolution for ultrasound imaging systems is in the 200-300 micron range. With Star-P, we were able to tap into the University's supercomputing clusters to generate ultra high resolution images of 67 microns, without having to become parallel programming experts."
Star-P is an interactive parallel computing platform that enables the biomedical engineering team to code algorithms and imaging models on their desktops using MATLAB, but run them instantly and interactively on a 32-processor Linux cluster with 64 gigabytes of memory. Star-P eliminates the need to re-program the applications in C, Fortran or MPI to run on parallel systems -- which typically takes months to complete for large, complex problems.
The U.Va. Engineering School team joins a growing a list of life sciences research organizations that have turned to Star-P to boost research productivity and overcome computational roadblocks. For example, researchers in MIT's Computational and Systems Biology Initiative (CSBi) are using Star-P to create new biological models that may someday yield new drug discoveries. It's also being used by scientists at the National Cancer Institute's (NCI's) Pediatric Oncology Branch to mine vast public databases of genomic information for potential new medical discoveries. And, researchers at Australia's Howard Florey Institute are using Star-P to rapidly analyze large MRI datasets that may someday reveal correlations between brain structure and conditions such as ADHD, Alzheimer's, auditory hallucinations and primal urges (e.g. thirst).
The TONE research project was funded by a grant from the U.S. Army Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program in Breast Cancer. The technology is patent pending and the project results will be published in an upcoming issue of IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.
Article Tools
Share Options
(Digg, Technorati, more)
Subscribe
Sponsored Links
PGI Accelerator™ Fortran 95/03 and C99 compilers for x64+NVIDIA
Accelerate applications on x64+GPU platforms by adding OpenMP-like compiler directives to existing Fortran and C programs. Available now for Linux, MacOS and Windows. Download a free 15 day trial.
Platform HPC Workgroup Manager
Platform HPC Workgroup Manager integrates all the cluster productivity tools you need to deploy, run and manage your HPC environment.
RSS Feeds
Feeds by Topic
- Applications
- Developer Tools
- Interconnects
- Middleware
- Networks
- Processors
- Storage
- Systems
- Visualization
Feeds by Industry
Feeds by Content Type
Feature Articles
The Week in Review
C-DAC announces plans for a petaflop system; IBM researchers are working on vertical integration techniques to extend Moore's Law another 15 years. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...
Moscow State University Supercomputer Has Petaflop Aspirations
The Moscow State University supercomputer, Lomonosov, has been selected for a high-performance makeover, with the goal of tripling its processing power to achieve petaflop-level performance in 2010. T-Platforms, who developed and manufactured the supercomputer, is the odds-on favorite to lead the project.
Read More...
Intel Ups Performance Ante with Westmere Server Chips
Right on schedule, Intel has launched its Xeon 5600 processors, codenamed "Westmere EP." The 5600 represents the 32nm sequel to the Xeon 5500 (Nehalem EP) for dual-socket servers. Intel is touting better performance and energy efficiency, along with new security features, as the big selling points of the new Xeons.
Read More...
Top Headlines
Australia Commissions Cray Supercomputer
Mar 19 | OfficialWire | New super to support intelligence work Down Under. Read more...
Intel Partners See 'Easy' Upgrade Path With Xeon 5600 Chips
Mar 18 | ChannelWeb | Westmere parts already showing up in HPC machines. Read more...
AMD: OEMs primed for Opteron 6100s
Mar 17 | The Register | But what about the tier ones? Read more...
Arrival of the Desktop Supercomputer
Mar 17 | Cadalyst Magazine | A new generation of workstations is changing the nature of technical computing. Read more...
Scheduling HPC In The Cloud
Mar 17 | Linux Magazine | Latest iteration of Sun Grid Engine able to tap into Cloud. Read more...
Featured Whitepapers
Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™
Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.
Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing
Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.
Multimedia
Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable
Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.
Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers
Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.
Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet
LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html
Newsletters
Stay informed! Subscribe to HPCwire email Newsletters.
HPC Job Bank
-
Sr. Research Systems Architect
Harvard Medical School -
Director of Research Information Technology
City of Hope -
Postdoctoral Research Associate in Computational Sciences
Oak Ridge Institute -
Computational Scientist
The Pennsylvania State University -
Director High Performance Computing/Computer Cluster Administrator in the Department of Astronomy
University of Massachusetts / Amherst -
High Performance Computing Applications Developer
Revolution Computing - Visit the HPCwire Job Bank
Featured Events
-
April 13-14, 2010
HPC User Forum
Dearborn , MI
USA
-
April 19, 2010
2010 High Performance Linux Financial Markets
New York , NY
USA
-
April 19-21, 2010
Cloud Computing Conference & Expo 2010 East
NY , NY
USA
-
April 19-23, 2010
Cloud Slam Events --Producer of Cloud Lab '10
Online Event
-
April 26-29, 2010
ESC Silicon Valley 2010
San Jose , CA
USA
-
May 10-12, 2010
DEISA PRACE Symposium 2010
Barcelona Spain