Work Package 5: Real-Time Management of ESS Data

The objectives of WP 5 is to maximise the scientific output of the ESS by enabling live (real time) processing of the data taken on ESS instruments. This will be achieved by developing the software infrastructure needed to make this data available as a live, publish/subscribe, (data) stream to which data reduction, and analysis, software can subscribe to process the data.

Task 5.1: Creating a standard neutron event data stream for different detector types

The ESS instruments will use a variety of neutron detector types and the raw output from these detectors will take different forms. The detectors for ESS described in WP4, Tasks 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3, will be new for neutron scattering.

The work done in this task will examine whether CPU, GPU or FPGA processing is required to perform the computations for these new detector developments and will create the optimised code to perform the computations and transmit the resulting neutron event data to the data aggregator software of Task 5.3.

Task 5.2: Creating a standard method for streaming meta-data for fast applied fields

In this task we will develop the software to acquire, and make available to the data aggregator software (Task 5.3), the spectra for the fast applied fields, time stamped with the same absolute time as the neutron event data.

Task 5.3: Software to aggregate and make available the neutron event data and sample meta-data

Tasks 5.1 and 5.2 will develop software to capture, and time stamp, the neutron event data and the fast field sample meta-data, while slow sample meta-data can be captured using the EPICS (standard) method. This task, 5.3, will develop the software to aggregate these 3 sources of data into one data stream and make it available (publish it) so that other software packages can subscribe to the data stream and use the data for processing.