Applications
NetSolve and Statistical Parametric Mapping

Statistical Parametric Mapping

The Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM) package was developed by members and collaborators of the Wellcome Department of Cognitive Neurology. Preliminary work has been done at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville to improve the performance of SPM by porting aspects of the package to NetSolve. The following summary of SPM's focus is from the SPM web site:

Statistical Parametric Mapping refers to the construction and assessment of spatially extended statistical process used to test hypotheses about [neuro]imaging data from SPECT/PET & fMRI. These ideas have been instantiated in software that is called SPM.

NetSolve and SPM

Although parts of the SPM code are inherently parallel, very little work has been done previously to take advantage of this program structure. Recent work has been done at the University of Tennessee to exploit some of SPM's parallelization through NetSolve. As an example, when aligning a series of picture slices, much of the computation being performed on each slice is completely independent from other slices. NetSolve's task farming interface provides a natural means for sharing work across several NetSolve servers.

SPM requires NetSolve's Matlab interface in order to carry out its parallelization. Through a series of Matlab scripts and Matlab compiled executables using NetSolve's Matlab interface, executions have been timed to run in one half to one third the time of unmodified code in some simulations. Work on integrating SPM and NetSolve is still in early stages and is not currently ready for use.


Institution: Wellcome Department of Cognitive Neurology

Related Work

 


Additional Applications

 
 

  Innovative Computing Laboratory
 
Contact NetSolve: netsolve@cs.utk.edu Computer Science Department
  University of Tennessee