The Software Group provides software in the form of development, support, maintenance, and expertise capabilities in the areas of control, data acquisition and data processing.

The group is composed of 3 units: Accelerator Control, Beamline Control and Data Automation.

The Software Group has skills in the following areas :

  • programming of Python, C++, TypeScript, JavaScript, Java,
  • operating systems mainly Linux and Windows with some support for MacOS
  • graphical user interfaces in the web with React.js, desktop with PyQT and Java/Swing
  • optimising algorithms using special hardware like GPGU's
  • databases both SQL and noSQL based
  • accelerator and beamline control systems
  • metadata and data formats (NeXus/HDF5)
  • workflows and online data analysis
  • scientific data processing
  • FAIR data management
  • data portals

Do not hesitate to contact us if you need help in any of these areas.

We are home of and leading member of the following successful collaborations:

  • Tango Controls - a toolkit for building distributed control systems
  • MXCuBE - a web-based data acquisition system for MX experiments
  • ISPyB - information system for protein crystallography beamlines
  • ICAT - a metadata catalog which for raw and processed data from all techniques

The following innovative software packages are seeking collaboration partners:

  • BLISS - a modern Python based sequencer for data acquisition
  • Ewoks - an meta workflow system for automating data processing
  • Daiquiri - a web-based user interface for sequencing and data acquisition

We develop a number of software packages which have been exported and are used at other sites e.g.  :

  • Silx - a library for data reduction and PyQt graphical components for data visualisation
  • Lima1 and Lima2 - two frameworks for a wide range of high performance 2D detectors
  • hdfplugin - a packaging of popular HDF5 compression filters
  • h5web - a web-based viewer for HDF5 files (available online)

The Software Group software is by default Open Source. All our software can be found at one of the following places:

The Software Group participates in the following European projects:

  • PaNOSC - the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) project for Photon and Neutron science
  • STREAMLINE - a project to improve solutions and processes  to take full advantage of the EBS
  • AddMorePower - a project for inventing new materials for power production
  • OSCARS - the science cluster EOSC project