Parallel Pencil-Beam Redefinition Algorithm

Paul Alderson, Mark Wright, Amit Jain, Richard Boyd

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

<div class="line" id="line-13"> The growing sophistication in radiation treatment strategies requires the utilization of increasingly accurate, but computationally intense, dose algorithms, such as the electron pencil-beam rede&filig;nition algorithm (PBRA). The sequential implementation of the PBRA is in production use at the MD Anderson Cancer center. The PBRA is di&ffilig;cult to parallelize because of the large amounts of data involved that is accessed in an irregular pattern taking varying amounts of time in each iteration. A case study of the parallelization of the PBRA code on a Beowulf cluster using PVM and PThreads is presented. The solution uses a non-trivial way of exchanging minimal amount of data between processes to allow a natural partitioning to work. Multi-threading is used to cut down on the communication times between CPUs in the same box. Finally, an adaptive load-balancing technique is used to further improve the speedup.</div>
Original languageAmerican English
JournalProceedings of 10th Conference on Recent Advances in Parallel Virtual Machine and Message Passing Interface, Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Volume2840
StatePublished - 2003

EGS Disciplines

  • Computer Sciences
  • Theory and Algorithms

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