The challenge of delivering productive high-performance computing is especially relevant to computational imaging. One technique in particular, iterative image reconstruction, has emerged as a prominent technique in medical and scientific imaging because it offers enticing application benefits. However, it often demands high-performance implementations that can meet tight application deadlines, and the ongoing development of the iterative reconstruction techniques discourages ad-hoc performance optimization efforts.

This work explores productive techniques for implementing fast image reconstruction codes. We present a domain-specific programming language that is expressive enough to represent a variety of important reconstruction problems, but restrictive enough that its programs can be analyzed and transformed to attain good performance on modern multi-core, many-core and GPU platforms. We present case studies from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), ptychography, magnetic particle imaging, and microscopy that achieve up to 90% of peak performance. We extend our work to the distributed-memory setting for an MRI reconstruction task. There, our approach gets perfect strong scaling for reasonable machine sizes, and sets the best-known reconstruction time for our particular reconstruction task. The results indicate that a domain-specific language can be successful in hiding much of the complexity of implementing fast reconstruction codes.