tomoRecon: High-speed tomography reconstruction on workstations using multi-threading

Computers have changed remarkably in just the last 2-3 years. Memory is now very inexpensive, as little as $10/GB, or less than $1000 for 96GB. Computers with 8 or 12 cores are now inexpensive, starting at less than $3,000. This means that affordable workstations are in principle now capable of processing large tomography datasets. But for the most part tomography reconstruction software has not changed to take advantage of these new capabilities. Most installations use clusters of Linux machines, spreading the work over computers running multiple processes. It is significantly simpler and cheaper to run a single process that spreads the job over multiple threads running on multiple cores. tomoRecon is a new multi-threaded library for such tomography data reconstruction. It consists of only 545 lines of C++ code, on top of the ~800 lines in the Gridrec reconstruction code. The performance using tomoRecon on a single modern workstation significantly exceeds dedicated clusters currently in use at synchrotron beamlines.