Experiment Management

Experiment orchestration will be handled with Diamond’s Athena Platform: a service-based experiment orchestration system built on top of NSLS-II’s Python based Bluesky/Ophyd data collection framework providing a managed extensive software deployment local to the beamline. Bluesky is a set of python libraries for experiment control and data collection currently used by several facilities around the world. It is highly customisable, providing data streaming, rich metadata, and a decoupled logic and hardware. Bluesky refers to an experimental procedure as a “plan” and enables “adaptive plans” which automatically tailor the acquisition flow based on monitored signals or analyses.

Athena will scope services into functional blocks communicating with each other via a message bus. Initial services include BlueAPI, an encapsulation of the Bluesky Run Engine providing a REST API to allow client services to interact with it in a controlled manner. A NeXus file writing service will consume Bluesky documents and write NeXus files. Further services providing data management/access, standard Auth/Auth and Session Management functionality, etc. will be developed according to a detailed schedule, as there is capacity and business requirement.

Ultimately aims include:

• Delivery of developments in the end user-experience, experiment definition, execution and monitoring, remote operation, automation and integration, realised via the delivery of a collection of Acquisition Platform Services to replace the functionality of the existing GDA application.
• Provision a modern Python-based scripting environment for beamline users and staff to increase productivity though access to the rich Python scientific software ecosystem. This will enable scientists to leverage the scientific Python ecosystem at every stage of an experiment from data acquisition through data analysis.
• Flexible experiment definition and orchestration capabilities will be developed to coordinate access and control of experiments in a robust, predictable, and extensible manner. This will be delivered through an extensible hierarchy of Scanning Services and a Workflow Engine. This will handle increased sample analysis throughput.
• Improved configurability will allow tailoring of software to meet scientists’ demands. The new platform will also result in more timely software feature delivery and greater bandwidth for feature requests, improving maintainability and reduced operational cost through the adoption of coherent, industry standard components.
• Advanced beamline automation will be developed to build on Scanning Services’ capabilities to increase beamline throughput and repeatability of complex experiments by enabling analysis driven data acquisition and intelligent automation.
• Adaptive experiment control using data acquisition and the results of data analysis processing workflows will be possible.
• More comprehensive remote access, with enhanced role-based security applied will be delivered.