Neutron Science Software Iniative - NeSSI

The Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) is currently under development at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The SNS project is a partnership involving six DOE national laboratories (Argonne, Brookhaven, Jefferson, Lawerence Berkely, Los Alamos, and Oak Ridge). The $1.4 billion facility will produce the world's most intense pulsed neutron beam for scientific research and industrial development. In conjunction with facilities and instrument development is the need to produce integrated software to operate instruments and acquire, analyze, and visualize data. Scientists and researchers from around the world will come to SNS to perform research, and software will play a significant role in enabling their work.

The Instrument Systems Group within the SNS Experimental Facilities Division is charged with developing, deploying, an maintaining data acquisition, analysis, and visualization software. This Neutron Science Software Initiative (NeSSI) has undertaken integration of both existing and new software to enable state-of-the-art research. The resulting software is intended to be freely available to the user community for their use. The SNS project is responsible for working with other facilities and the user community to develop software that will be capable of functioning with SNS instrumentation – with the more lofty goal of supporting neutron scattering research in general.

The Software

The diagram below illustrates a conceptual infrastructure and data path for software to support neutron science research. Software needs are compartmentalized into 6 basic areas. The diagram also outlines software development responsibilities among SNS and the user community. SNS must develop software in much the same way as the instrumentation ensuring that necessary capability is available to the user. Certain areas such as acquisition, some data treatment and analysis, and a significant portion of data management are areas where SNS plays a lead role in designing and developing this software. The SNS is also responsible for ensuring that visualization, analysis, data format, network services, and high performance computing needs are met with various levels of contribution expected from the user community. And lastly, the SNS looks largely to the user community for contribution of simulation software.

Note that raw data utilizes the NeXus ( http://www.neutron.anl.gov/nexus/) hierarchical data format.