Julien Noel

Julien Noel, the company's CT product manager, says the exceptional computational power afforded by CUDA and Tesla hardware is increasing customer productivity and transforming their workflow. Read more ...

I recently talked with Julien Noel, the CT (computed tomography) Product Manager at North Star Imaging in chilly Rogers, Minnesota. North Star Imaging (NSI) specializes in industrial X-ray for nondestructive testing and analysis. They have seen firsthand how the adoption of HPC -- in the form of expanded computational power from NVIDIA's GPUs and their CUDA API -- can transform a business and create new value for them and for their customers.

HPCwire: What does North Star do for its customers?

Noel: Our 2D digital X-ray systems are often used throughout the manufacturing process for product quality control and manual or automated approval/rejection applications. Our 3D CT systems have typically been used for research and development, failure analysis, reverse engineering and other similar tasks.

Our products and services are geared toward anyone who needs to inspect an object internally and/or externally without destroying it. We are involved with industries such as aerospace, medical device, electronics, automotive, museums and many more, and have had the opportunity to work with companies such as Boeing, Bell Helicopter, Lockheed Martin, NASA, US Army, Medtronic, Kawasaki and the list goes on.

HPCwire: What is the problem you are solving with HPC -- in this case NVIDIA's GPUs?

Noel: Computed tomography involves complex algorithms for 3D reconstruction.
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Noel: Historically, we used NVIDIA graphic cards for the 3D rendering module of our CT software. For our CT reconstruction development, the CUDA interface was so easy to use and so powerful that our team naturally focused on NVIDIA technology, with computation on the Tesla C1060 Computing Processor. Moreover, the NVIDIA staff has been very reactive and helpful in providing our team with technical solutions and graphics cards for evaluation and development.

HPCwire: What improvements have your customers seen, and how has that made a difference?

Noel: Through the use of our new CT software with GPU reconstruction technology, our data transformations are completed significantly faster than they had been.
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Noel: North Star Imaging's development team has been very efficient in integrating the GPU reconstruction module in efX-CT.
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Noel: The GPU capabilities using NVIDIA's supercomputer systems have been a great improvement to our efX-CT software and today, most of NSI's CT system customers are using it. Automatic CT systems with fast GPU reconstruction are currently being developed for inline CT inspection and 3D metrology. Also, we are working on more 3D rendering capabilities for real-time and interactive inspection using NVIDIA products as well as fast data filtering for reconstruction quality improvement.

Julien Noel, the company's CT product manager, says the exceptional computational power afforded by CUDA and Tesla hardware is increasing customer productivity and transforming their workflow. Thu, 18 Dec 2008 20:30:50 GMT

Julien Noel - CT Product Manager, North Star Imaging, Inc., "Measurements and CAD Comparison Using Computed Tomography"