Recent advances at MacCHESS, the macromolecular diffraction facility at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS), have moved the initial recording of X-ray images from film to digital formats. As a consequence, the elapsed time for exposure and digitization has been dramatically reduced, making it practical to consider monitoring ongoing experiments with a visualization work station. The controller, a work station at the experimental facility, instructs the computer interface for the detector to begin collecting data and notifies the parallel task dispatcher to accept these data. The image data sets are sent via a gigabit network to the dispatcher in a dedicated parallel computing environment where they wait in queue for the next available worker task on one of the parallel processors. When a worker becomes available, an image is sent to it, processed, and forwarded to the visualization server within the same computing environment. This server manages the processed files in response to instructions from a visualization work station at MacCHESS. Researchers or collaborators will be able to visualize data at remote sites also. Because the design of the system does not require the functions of data acquisition, processing, and visualization to be sychronized, acquisition can continue at the same time that the researcher is visualizing and examining data already received. This system for parallel image processing and experimental control is intended to be portable across a wide variety of computing environments. CTC has developed a graphical user interface for the controller to simplify data acquisition. The raw and processed images will be visualized using IBM Visualization Data Explorer, an object- oriented software package that also provides a graphical interface and that is available for a broad range of platforms from different vendors. With the exception of the image processing that will run on each of the workers, which is currently in FORTRAN, the code is written in C++; communications are based on standard protocols (MPI within the SP, and TCP/IP among the rest of the components of the system). Moreover, the scalable RISC-based architecture of the SP is an ideal environment for such prototype development and eventual production usage. Processing code for the initial production system was contributed by long-term MacCHESS user Michael Rossman at Purdue University.
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