Sections is the essential element of HTTomo’s framework which is related to how the I/O operations and processing of data is organised.
Note
The main purpose of sections is to organise the data input/output workflow, as well as, chaining together the processing elements so that the constructed pipeline is computationally efficient.
In order to understand how sections are formed, we give here the list of rules with examples when sections are created.
Sections are created when:
Re-slicing is needed, which is related to the change of pattern.
The output of the method needs to be saved to the disk.
The Side outputs is required by one of the methods.
It can be seen that creating more sections in pipelines is to be avoided when building an efficient pipeline. Creating a section usually leads to synchronisation of all processes on the CPU and potentially, if not enough memory, through-disk operations.