Kevin Boyle

GPU Implementation of the Affine Transform for 3D Image Registration

Recent developments in 3D low-light level CCD (L3CCD) image capture have resulted in vast volumes of data being produced in real time which require image registration. The amount of data involved means that acceleration of the processing is essential. One of the key steps in one iterative registration algorithm is the application of an affine transform to all the planes of a 3D image. This paper presents details and performance results for a number of parallelized implementations of the affine transform on the NVIDIA 8800 GPU series, and shows that the transform runs 128 times faster on the GPU than a C++ version on a PC, or 54 times faster when data transfer between the GPU and the host PC is included.

Options for Northern Ireland

Is Northern Ireland an integral part of the United Kingdom? Can it be effectively governed by the same democratic system as the rest of the United Kingdom? The answer to both these questions is ‘probably not’. Northern Ireland is not an integral part of the United Kingdom in that successive British governments have declared themselves to be willing to cede it to the Irish Republic if a majority of the people in Northern Ireland so wish, and in that the Labour Party and many others have committed themselves to the active pursuit of the reunification of Ireland. Attempts to govern Northern Ireland by the same democratic system as the rest of the United Kingdom have patently failed, and there is a large measure of consensus that some other form of democracy will have to be established before effective powers can be devolved back from London to Belfast. In the meantime, pending the achievement either of Irish unification or of some other democratic system of government, Northern Ireland is governed by a more or less colonial system of ‘direct rule’, and the civil strife and terrorism which has been going on there since 1969 seems likely to continue indefinitely.