Celestial image processing on a symmetrical multiprocessor
Nelson A. Bonito, Richard G. Lyon, Kevin M. Farnham, John W. V. Miller · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1994
The advent of symmetrical multi-processor workstations has made it possible to perform computation-intensive image processing on a desktop system with performance approaching that of a large-scale parallel supercomputer. Discussed is the implementation and software architecture of a system developed for use in the processing of infrared spacecraft data. The software constructs infrared scan data into high fidelity images while simultaneously separating celestial point sources from the diffuse background. The methodology relies on parallelism at the operating system level for multiple data element access, and at the source code levels for multiple instruction performance. All modules operate simultaneously on shared memory segments using interprocess communication to improve the data flow through the various required computations.