research-article

Using OpenCL to Enable Software-like Development of an FPGA-Accelerated Biophotonic Cancer Treatment Simulator

Authors:

Tanner Young-Schultz,

Vaughn BetzAuthors Info & Claims

FPGA '20: Proceedings of the 2020 ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays

Pages 86 - 96

https://doi.org/10.1145/3373087.3375300

Published: 24 February 2020 Publication History

Abstract

The simulation of light propagation through tissues is important for medical applications, such as photodynamic therapy (PDT) for cancer treatment. To optimize PDT an inverse problem, which works backwards from a desired distribution of light to the parameters that caused it, must be solved. These problems have no closed-form solution and therefore must be solved numerically using an iterative method. This involves running many forward light propagation simulations which is time-consuming and computationally intensive.

Currently, the fastest general software solver for this problem is FulMonteSW. It models complex 3D geometries with tetrahedral meshes and uses Monte Carlo techniques to model photon interactions with tissues. This work presents FullMonteFPGACL: an FPGA-accelerated version of FullMonteSW using an Intel Stratix 10 FPGA and the Intel FPGA SDK for OpenCL. FullMonteFPGACL has been validated and benchmarked using several models and achieves improvements in performance (4x) and energy-efficiency (11x) over the optimized and multi-threaded FullMonteSW implementation. We discuss methods for extending the design to improve the performance and energy-efficiency ratios to 16x and 17x, respectively. We achieved these gains by developing in an agile fashion using OpenCL to facilitate quick prototyping and hardware-software partitioning. However, achieving competitive area and performance required careful design of the hardware pipeline and expression of its structure in OpenCL. This led to a hybrid design style that can improve productivity when developing complex applications on an FPGA.

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Cited By

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https://doi.org/10.3982/QE2344
Xu LZhu ZLi T(2024)Exhaustive review of acceleration strategies for Monte Carlo simulations in photon transitJournal of Innovative Optical Health Sciences10.1142/S179354582430004017:05Online publication date: 25-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1142/S1793545824300040
Boutros ABetz V(2024)Field-Programmable Gate Array ArchitectureHandbook of Computer Architecture10.1007/978-981-97-9314-3_49(417-463)Online publication date: 21-Dec-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-9314-3_49
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Index Terms

Using OpenCL to Enable Software-like Development of an FPGA-Accelerated Biophotonic Cancer Treatment Simulator
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Modeling and simulation
2. Hardware
  1. Integrated circuits
    1. Reconfigurable logic and FPGAs
      1. Hardware accelerators
      2. Reconfigurable logic applications

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

FPGA '20: Proceedings of the 2020 ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays

February 2020

346 pages

ISBN:9781450370998

DOI:10.1145/3373087

General Chair:
Stephen Neuendorffer
Xilinx, USA
,
Program Chair:
Lesley Shannon
Simon Fraser University, Canada

Copyright © 2020 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 24 February 2020

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FPGA '20: The 2020 ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays

February 23 - 25, 2020

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Cited By

Cheela BDeHon AFernández-Villaverde JPeri A(2025)Programming FPGAs for economics: An introduction to electrical engineering economicsQuantitative Economics10.3982/QE234416:1(49-87)Online publication date: 2025
https://doi.org/10.3982/QE2344
Xu LZhu ZLi T(2024)Exhaustive review of acceleration strategies for Monte Carlo simulations in photon transitJournal of Innovative Optical Health Sciences10.1142/S179354582430004017:05Online publication date: 25-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1142/S1793545824300040
Boutros ABetz V(2024)Field-Programmable Gate Array ArchitectureHandbook of Computer Architecture10.1007/978-981-97-9314-3_49(417-463)Online publication date: 21-Dec-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-9314-3_49
Cheng JJosipović LWickerson JConstantinides G(2023)Parallelising Control Flow in Dynamic-scheduling High-level SynthesisACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems10.1145/359997316:4(1-32)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3599973
Parilov EBeeson KPotasek MZhu TSun HSourvanos D(2023)A Monte Carlo simulation for moving light source in intracavity PDTOptical Methods for Tumor Treatment and Detection: Mechanisms and Techniques in Photodynamic Therapy XXXI10.1117/12.2649538(7)Online publication date: 14-Mar-2023
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Mirhosseini MFazlali MFallah MLee J(2023)A fast MILP solver for high-level synthesis based on heuristic model reduction and enhanced branch and bound algorithmThe Journal of Supercomputing10.1007/s11227-023-05109-279:11(12042-12073)Online publication date: 6-Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-023-05109-2
Oppermann JMickaliger MSinnen O(2023)Pulsar search acceleration using FPGAs and OpenCL templatesExperimental Astronomy10.1007/s10686-022-09888-z56:1(239-266)Online publication date: 23-Jan-2023
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Cheela BDeHon AFernández-Villaverde JPeri A(2022)Programming Fpgas for Economics: An Introduction to Electrical Engineering EconomicsSSRN Electronic Journal10.2139/ssrn.4086226Online publication date: 2022
https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4086226
Cong JLau JLiu GNeuendorffer SPan PVissers KZhang Z(2022)FPGA HLS Today: Successes, Challenges, and OpportunitiesACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems10.1145/353077515:4(1-42)Online publication date: 8-Aug-2022
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