High-performance parallel and stream processing of X-ray microdiffraction data on multicores

Abstract

We present the design and implementation of a high-performance system for processing synchrotron X-ray microdiffraction (XRD) data in IBM InfoSphere Streams on multicore processors. We report on the parallel and stream processing techniques that we use to harvest the power of clusters of multicores to analyze hundreds of gigabytes of synchrotron XRD data in order to reveal the microtexture of polycrystalline materials. The timing to process one XRD image using one pipeline is about ten times faster than the best C program at present. With the support of InfoSphere Streams platform, our software is able to be scaled up to operate on clusters of multi-cores for processing multiple images concurrently. This system provides a high-performance processing kernel to achieve near real-time data analysis of image data from synchrotron experiments. © IOP Publishing Ltd.