Contents Issue 20 August 1999
|
|
| Parallel computing is here to stay
|
|
A year ago, there was a lot of uncertainty
in the parallel processing arena. No apparent progress was visible, people
were leaving the field and a decreasing
interest of companies in
high-end parallel processing led to some pessimism. According to
Professor Henk Sips
parallel processing has now come into quiet waters. It is definitely here to stay. Perhaps it is not as exciting as a few years ago, but there lies much work ahead. We talked to Henk Sips at the Parco Parallel computing conference
in Delft, of which he was co-organiser.
|
| If you want to think parallel, think big
|
|
|
One of the popular definitions of a "supercomputer" is a machine that
only the big US national laboratories can afford. Although this is perhaps a bit exaggerated, These laboratories
house the fastest machines in the world, and most of the time they have several of them. One of the labs is Sandia National Laboratory. Currently it has the fastest machine in the world according to the TOP500 list, and it also has several other big machines, including some large clusters. We did meet David Womble from Sandia at Parco in Delft and asked his opinion about the future of high-performance computing.
|
| From computational vision programming to image guided surgery at Utrecht University Hospital
|
|
|
At the Parco 99 Conference in Delft, Dr. Bart M. ter Haar Romeny gave an overview of the advanced applications in medicine which are actively being used at the Utrecht University Hospital.
Dr. ter Haar Romeny received an M.S. in Applied Physics from Delft University of Technology in 1978, and a Ph.D. from Utrecht University in 1983.
After being the principal physicist of the Utrecht University Hospital Radiology Department, he joined in 1989 the Image Sciences Institute of Utrecht University as an associate professor.
Housed within the Radiology Department of Utrecht University Hospital, the Image Sciences Institute (ISI) is engaged in fundamental computer vision as well as in clinical research.
An intense collaboration with the industry has amounted in several innovative imaging projects.
|
| Design of finite element head dummies able to support neurosurgery planning
|
|
|
Ulrich Hartmann is working at the NEC Europe C&C Research Laboratories in Sankt Augustin, Germany.
During Parco 99, he presented a new finite element method (FEM) based approach on parallel platforms to produce mechanical head models.
The head models are used in three areas of interest.
The first focuses on discovering the mechanisms behind brain injuries after impact; the second application field relates to neurosurgery planning and educational training, including the estimation of mechanical consequences of tumour growth; and the third one corresponds to the needs of forensic medicine physicians who have to reconstruct accidents in order to present their results before court.
|
| Parallel finite element model calculations define organ deformations in LASSO surgery simulator
|
|
|
At the Electronics Laboratory of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich, research assistant Alex Rhomberg is involved in the laparoscopy project, called LASSO.
During the Parco 99 Conference, he provided an overview of the parallel architecture which has been developed in the project to perform interactive finite element method (FEM) computations for the simulations of organ deformations in a surgery simulator.
Laparascopy is an operation technique for minimally invasive surgery. The basic idea is to minimize damage to healthy tissue while trying to reach the actual surgical location.
This results in major gain in patient recovery after operation.
|
| Parallel pre-processing of medical data constitutes excellent cost/performance alternative
|
|
|
Vincenzo Positano is working as a researcher at the Institute of Clinical Physiology in Pisa, which is part of the Italian Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR).
His team is involved in a project in which a parallel vector machine (PVM) is used on a computer network to perform fast pre-processing of large medical data sets.
At the occasion of Parco 99, Positano gave an overview of the 3D and 4D image processing performance of this parallel implementation in a clinical environment.
|
