Speaker
Dr
Miklos Emri
(PET Center, University of Debrecen)
Description
Practical engineering aspects of the next generation nuclear medicine detectors with
Ethernet based data transfer entrust the solution of high speed data acquisition,
real time event processing and data storing to software developers. In response to
this challenge, a new cluster based data acquisition library (DAQ) was elaborated
as part of a complex, object oriented, platform independent medical imaging software
development environment.
The communication between individual components (nodes) of our data acquisition
system and the processing of the detector events are completely separate. Intranodal
communication is achieved by traditional multithread server-client relations using
standard stream and datagram sockets. A special message parsing protocol ensures the
control, manipulation and monitoring of the nodes of the data acquisition network.
The separation of the communication layer from event processing is a substantial
advantage of this library acquitting the application developer from thread- and
socket manipulations leaving them for the DAQ-developer and maintenance team.
This performance test is aimed at (1) the comparison of the bandwidth of
DAQ-protocol based data transfer to the theoretical one, (2) the determination of
bandwidth and computing capacity demand required by the communication layer, (3) the
analysis of the dependence of the effective data bandwidth on the number of detectors
and the type of the applied real-time event processing algorithms, and (4) the
hardware requirement (in terms of number of type of processors and network
parameters) estimation of small animal positron emission tomographs of various
detector configuration.
Shortage in Ethernet based real PET detector systems capable of generating an
arbitrary number of detector events of different count rates explains why only
detector emulators were used in this study. Performance data were obtained using a
special double-backboned Linux-cluster of 7 Supermicro hosts with dual 64-bit 3.0GHz
Xeon processors and dual Gigabit Ethernet interfaces. Hosts were connected to both
the local area network and the gigabit data acquisition network.
Our data show that the bandwidth and calculation capacity demand of the communication
layer is negligible. A calculation method is proposed to estimate the hardware
requirements of any small animal or human PET scanner controlled by the outlined type
of software.
Author
Dr
Miklos Emri
(PET Center, University of Debrecen)
Co-authors
Prof.
András Kerel
(Royal Institute of Technology)
Dr
Dezső Novák
(Institute of Nuclear Research of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences)
Mr
Gergő Molnár
(PET Center, University of Debrecen)
Dr
Gyula Hegyesi
(Institute of Nuclear Research of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences)
Dr
Gábor Opposits
(PET Center, University of Debrecen)
Mr
Iván Valastyán
(Institute of Nuclear Research of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences)
Mr
József Imrek
(Institute of Nuclear Research of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences)
Dr
József Molnár
(Institute of Nuclear Research of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences)
Prof.
Lajos Trón
(PET Center, University of Debrecen)
Dr
László Balkay
(PET Center, University of Debrecen)
Mr
László Mudrony
(PET Center, University of Debrecen)
Mr
Sándor Kis
(PET Center, University of Debrecen)