The Varian Experience
Today’s worldwide first ARIA 8.1 installation was a routine 14-hours-50-workstations-task at KFJ hospital. By Saturday afternoon, everything was running fine.
What’s new with Eclipse 8.1? Among other interesting features (like the Beam Angle Optimizer), the release introduced the Distributed Calculation Framework (DCF), which replaced the Calculation Queue. The performance and stability of the DCF is really surprising. All dose calculation now runs both locally and on multiple network clients (they have a special service, the so-called “agent” installed, but not necessarily the Eclipse software itself). If the treatment plan is a Photon plan with multiple fields, each field is calculated on a different agent.
Electron fields (which are calculated with the eMC algorithm) are split up into subfields. The parallelization factor may be up to 16. The subfields are forwarded to the agents. When the last agent has completed his calculation task and returned the result to the calling client, dose is displayed. Needless to say that the user is not bothered - the DCF is fully automatic.
Electron fields (which are calculated with the eMC algorithm) are split up into subfields. The parallelization factor may be up to 16. The subfields are forwarded to the agents. When the last agent has completed his calculation task and returned the result to the calling client, dose is displayed. Needless to say that the user is not bothered - the DCF is fully automatic.
With the DCF, time-consuming calculations speed up by a factor of 10!
Parallelization!
Saturday, June 23, 2007
