SBIR/STTR Award attributes
X-ray light sources enable commercial research and development and scientific discovery in many disciplines and produce thousands of publishable discoveries every year. As a result of their success, facilities serve an increasingly diverse user community, often providing concurrent beam time and user support to dozens of domain scientists with unique backgrounds. Without significant software and infrastructure support, end users are faced with the challenge of adapting their workflows to coordinate experimental execution, data analyses, and simulations to facility-specific resources. An open-source platform for integrated data management, analysis, and simulation is being developed in support of end users and facility scientists at community facilities. The platform will enable selection and staging of data on local and remote computers, leveraging community frameworks for scientific data to expedite data operations during experiments. A corresponding graphical user interface will permit customizable analyses and active feedback to be generated concurrently with experiments. These tools will improve simulation and analysis workflows while reducing barriers to entry for high performance computing technologies and resources. An integrated analysis platform and corresponding graphical user interface for real-time processing of experimental data at light sources was developed. The platform leverages an existing framework for orchestrating experimental controls and data acquisition to streamline data access for users. The platform was also designed to support customizable analyses to be templated, automatically queued, and executed on arbitrary computing systems using community codes and deployable environments. Initial tests were performed using data and analysis pipelines adopted from operating beamlines to demonstrate feasibility. The proposed work will deploy the developed analysis platform on two operating X-ray beamlines for a series of unique experiments. The platform will be enhanced to support dynamic feedback during experiments, as well as high throughput data processing to support very fast measurements. Experimental demonstrations of actively guided experiments using novel diagnostic features will be performed. X-ray light sources serve an increasingly diverse, worldwide user community of scientists and engineers across many disciplines, with applications in basic research and industry. The open-source scientific application framework developed during this work will provide user support for sophisticated experimental configurations, data acquisition, analysis, and simulation workflows. The inclusion of a performance-oriented data framework will enable operation across distributed computing resources. This technology will be leveraged to deliver value to light source facilities and their growing community of users.
