Sci-Thur AM: Planning - 11: The impact of distributed calculation framework settings on plan calculation time

Some treatment planning system can divide a treatment plan calculation into multiple threads and allow both local and network computing resources to perform the calculation concurrently, which significantly reduces the calculation time for a calculation-demanding planning such as Volumetric Modulated Arc Therapy (VMAT) or electron Monte Carlo (eMC). This study tested in Eclipse (Varian, V10.0.39) the impact of Distributed Calculation Framework (DCF, V10.0.0.757) settings on calculation time in a planning environment that consists of 20 workstations with 8 core processors and 16GB RAMs installed on most of them. It is found that for an arc plan increasing the control point field parallelization factor reduces the total calculation time at beginning but lengthens the total calculation time after a certain level as a result of data sending time increase. Further increasing the factor may cause a serious net work traffic or even failure of a calculation. For an eMC plan the calculation time decreases monotonously with the increase of Monte carlo field parallelization factor, and the data sending time is insignificant compared to the calculation time. Increasing the local servant numbers reduces the data sending time but raises the calculation time for arc and eMC plans. The calculation time increment is more and more significant with the increase of local servants. The optimal DCF setting for a facility depends on the total number of calculation workstations available, the hardware configuration of the workstations, and the data transfer rate of the network. No conflict of interest exists in the study.