Parallelization of the model-based iterative reconstruction algorithm DIRA

New paradigms for parallel programming have been devised to simplify software development on multi-core processors and many-core graphical processing units (GPU). Despite their obvious benefits, the parallelization of existing computer programs is not an easy task. In this work, the use of the Open Multiprocessing (OpenMP) and Open Computing Language (OpenCL) frameworks is considered for the parallelization of the model-based iterative reconstruction algorithm DIRA with the aim to significantly shorten the code's execution time. Selected routines were parallelized using OpenMP and OpenCL libraries; some routines were converted from MATLAB to C and optimised. Parallelization of the code with the OpenMP was easy and resulted in an overall speedup of 15 on a 16-core computer. Parallelization with OpenCL was more difficult owing to differences between the central processing unit and GPU architectures. The resulting speedup was substantially lower than the theoretical peak performance of the GPU; the cause was explained. (authors)