A platform-oblivious approach for heterogeneous computing: A case study with Monte Carlo-based simulation for medical applications
Journal
FPGA 2016 - Proceedings of the 2016 ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays
Pages
42-47
Date Issued
2016
Author(s)
Abstract
Light is important and helpful in many medical applica- tions, such as cancer treatment. Computer modeling and simulation of light transport are often adopted to improve the quality of medical treatments. In particular, Monte Carlo-based simulations are considered to deliver accurate results, but require intensive computational resources. While several attempts to accelerate the Monte Carlo-based meth- ods for the simulation of photon transport with platform- specific programming schemes, such as CUDA on GPU and HDL on FPGA, have been proposed, the approach has lim- ited portability and prolongs software updates. In this pa- per, we parallelize the Monte Carlo modeling of light trans- port in multi-layered tissues (MCML) program with OpenCL, an open standard supported by a wide range of platforms. We characterize the performance of the parallelized MCML kernel program runs on CPU, GPU and FPGA. Compared to platform-specific programming schemes, our platform- oblivious approach provides a unified, highly portable code and delivers competitive performance and power efficiency. ? 2016 ACM.
SDGs
Other Subjects
Computer hardware description languages; Computer software; Computer software portability; Logic gates; Medical applications; Monte Carlo methods; Reconfigurable hardware; Competitive performance; Computational resources; Computer modeling and simulation; Heterogeneous computing; Medical treatment; Monte Carlo model; Photon transport; Power efficiency; Field programmable gate arrays (FPGA)
Type
conference paper