A distributed SIRT implementation for the ASTRA Toolbox

The ASTRA Toolbox is a software toolbox that enables rapid development of GPU accelerated tomography algorithms. It contains GPU implementations of forward and backprojection operations for common scanning geometries, as well as a set of algorithms for iterative reconstruction. These algorithms are currently limited to using a single GPU. A drawback of iterative reconstruction algorithms is that they are slow compared to classical backprojection algorithms. As a result, using only a single GPU can result in prohibitively long reconstruction times when working with large data volumes. In this paper, we present an extension of the ASTRA Toolbox with implementations of forward projection, backprojection and the SIRT algorithm that can be distributed over multiple GPUs and multiple workstations to make processing larger data sets with ASTRA feasible.