Evaluation of the use of the i860 Supercard in a 3D PET tomograph

The use of an i860 Supercard as an accelerator for a SUN SPARC 2 workstation in a clinical environment of a CTI/Siemens 3-D PET (positron emission tomography) scanner is discussed. First, the authors show several different C-language programming paradigms for the i860 and measure their performance. The authors compare the performance of the i860 with the native SUNs and with alternative accelerators such as MIMD transputers. They then evaluate the uses of the Supercard in a clinical environment for speeding up 3-D reconstruction and data compression. They show that the i860 can indeed speed up some C-language computer programs, although only by a factor of two without assembly-language level tuning of the C programs. However, a C-language data compression program actually runs slower on the i860 than on a SUN SS2. Therefore, the use of an i860 Supercard for a general-purpose accelerator may not be cost-effective