Modeling and Optimizing Data Transfer in GPU-Accelerated Optical Coherence Tomography

Signal processing of optical coherence tomography (OCT) has become a bottleneck for using OCT in medical and industrial applications. Recently, GPUs gained more importance as compute device to achieve video frame rate of 25 frames/s. Therefore, we develop a CUDA implementation of an OCT signal processing chain: We focus on reformulating the signal processing algorithms in terms of high-performance libraries like CUBLAS and CUFFT. Additionally, we use NVIDIAs stream concept to overlap computations and data transfers. Performance results are presented for two Pascal GPUs and validated with a derived performance model. The model gives an estimate for the overall execution time for the OCT signal processing chain, including compute and transfer times.