Running SALSA in Parallel

To get a statistically meaningful sample, SALSA should be used to generate a large number of rays. Extracting rays from a dataset and then finding absorbers within these rays can be a computationally expensive process. Thankfully, since each ray is independent of each other ray, this process can be easily parallelized.

SALSA is already equipped to generate rays in parallel using MPI. Additionally, generate_catalog() can be used to extract absorbers in parallel. This means that running SALSA in parallel is as simple as having multiple CPUs available to run on!

Warning

It’s not advisable to use SALSA within a Python script that itself uses MPI.

The following functions are written to be able to run in parallel:

• salsa.generate_lrays()

• salsa.construct_rays()

• salsa.generate_catalog() (both ray generation and absorber extraction)

• salsa.utils.check_rays()