Lessons learned in developing a low-cost high performance medical imaging cluster

This paper explores the usefulness of the Sony PlayStation 3^reg(PS3) for medical image processing. Medical image processing often entails dealing with a large number of high resolution images, requiring a large amount of computational power to process. The PS3 is powered by the cell broadband engine, a microprocessor created by IBM, capable of rapid numeric computation with low power requirements that has helped the unit to become a popular gaming unit. The unit can be repurposed as a low-cost high performance computing platform. In order to demonstrate the computational abilities of the PS3, several basic image processing tasks are implemented and compared with desktop PCs, equipped with general-purpose microprocessors. This article describes lessons learned in the process of building some fundamental image processing tasks. The article also describes the architecture of the cell broadband engine and provides information about developing applications given the architecture. The article also provides an introduction to setting up a high-performance image processing environment with a cluster of such relatively inexpensive PS3 units.