AbstractFreeSurfer is among the most widely used suites of software for the study of cortical and subcortical brain anatomy. However, analysis using FreeSurfer can be time-consuming and it lacks support for the graphics processing units (GPUs) after the core development team stopped maintaining GPU-accelerated versions due to significant programming cost. As FreeSurfer is a large project with millions of source lines, in this work, we introduce and examine the use of a directive-based framework, OpenACC, in GPU acceleration of FreeSurfer, and we found the OpenACC-based approach significantly reduces programming costs. Moreover, because the overhead incurred by CPU-to-GPU data transfer is the major challenge in delivering GPU-based codes of high performance, we compare two schemes, copy- and-transfer and overlapped-fully-transfer, to reduce such data transfer overhead. Exper-imental results show that the target function we accelerated with overlapped-fully-transfer scheme ran 2.3 as fast as the original CPU-based function, and the GPU-accelerated program achieved an average speedup of 1.2 compared to the original CPU-based program. These results demonstrate the usefulness and potential of utilizing the proposed OpenACC-based approach to integrate GPU support for FreeSurfer which can be easily extended to other computationally expensive functions and modules of FreeSurfer to achieve further speedup.
A New Data Transfer Scheme for eMMC Connected Subsystems
