Towards a parallel component for imaging in PETSc programming environment: a case study in 3-D echocardiography

A key issue in designing application codes which are able to effectively take advantage of the available high performance computing resources is to deal with the software management and development complexity. This is even more true for imaging applications. This work is the first dowel in a rather wide mosaic, aimed at construction of a PSE (Problem Solving Environment) oriented to imaging applications. We discuss computational efforts towards the development of a distributed software environment, enabling the transparent use of high performance computers and storage systems for 3-D Echocardiographic sequences denoising via nonlinear diffusion filtering. More precisely, we describe a component-based approach for the development of an integrated software environment relying on the Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation (PETSc). Our approach uses a distributed memory model where we hide, within the PETSc parallel objects, the details of internode communications while intranode communications have been handled at a higher level. We report some experiences we made on an in vivo acquired 3-D Echocardiographic sequence obtained by means of a rotational acquisition technique using Tomtec Imaging system.