UFO: A Scalable GPU-based Image Processing Framework for On-line Monitoring

Current synchrotron experiments require state-of-the-art scientific cameras with sensors that provide several million pixels, each at a dynamic range of up to 16 bits and the ability to acquire hundreds of frames per second. The resulting data bandwidth of such a data stream reaches several Gigabits per second. These streams have to be processed in real-time to achieve a fast process response. In this paper we present a computation framework and middleware library that provides re-usable building blocks to implement high-performance image processing algorithms without requiring profound hardware knowledge. It is based on a graph structure of computation nodes that process image transformation kernels on either CPU or GPU using the OpenCL subsystem. This system architecture allows deployment of the framework on a large range of computational hardware, from netbooks to hybrid compute clusters. We evaluated the library with standard image processing algorithms required for high quality tomographic reconstructions. The results show that speed-ups from 7x to 37x compared to traditional CPU-based solutions can be achieved with our approach, hence providing an opportunity for real-time on-line monitoring at synchrotron beam lines.