Exploiting desktop supercomputing for three-dimensional electron microscopy reconstructions using ART with blobs

Three-dimensional electron microscopy allows direct visualization of biological macromolecules close to their native state. The high impact of this technique in the structural biology field is highly correlated with the development of new image processing algorithms. In order to achieve subnanometer resolution, the size and number of images involved in a three-dimensional reconstruction increase and so do computer requirements. New chips integrating multiple processors are hitting the market at a reduced cost. This high-integration, low-cost trend has just begun and is expected to bring real supercomputers to our laboratory desktops in the coming years. This paper proposes a parallel implementation of a computation-intensive algorithm for three-dimensional reconstruction, ART, that takes advantage of the computational power in modern multicore platforms. ART is a sophisticated iterative reconstruction algorithm that has turned out to be well suited for the conditions found in three-dimensional electron microscopy. In view of the performance obtained in this work, these modern platforms are expected to play an important role to face the future challenges in three-dimensional electron microscopy.