High cone-angle x-ray computed micro-tomography with 186 GigaVoxel datasets

Abstract

X-ray computed micro-tomography systems are able to collect data with sub-micron resolution. This high- resolution imaging has many applications but is particularly important in the study of porous materials, where the sub-micron structure can dictate large-scale physical properties (e.g. carbonates, shales, or human bone). Sample preparation and mounting become difficult for these materials below 2mm diameter: consequently, a typical ultra-micro-CT reconstruction volume (with sub-micron resolution) will be around 3k × 3k × 10k voxels, with some reconstructions becoming much larger. In this paper, we discuss the hardware (MPI-parallel CPU/GPU) and software (python/C++/CUDA) tools used at the ANU CTlab to reconstruct ∼186 GigaVoxel datasets.