Overview

Cctbx.xfel at LCLS is built on five systems: the CS-PAD detector, pyana, LCLS’s queuing system, phil, and fundamentally, cctbx.

The CS-PAD detector

The LCLS at full capacity operates at 120 Hz. The incident photon packets are delivered in ~40 femtosecond wide pulses, each containing ~10^15 photons. This high repetition rate and compact beam delivery time necessitated the construction of a new detector, where the work of reading out and streaming recorded data at these high speeds is accomplished through the use of 64 sensors, arranged in a quadrangular pattern around a central hole (in the place of a beam stop). Each of the 4 quadrants, containing 16 of the sensors, is adjustable on rails radially away from the central hole to adjust the size of this hole. Indexing, predicting spot locations using a crystal orientation matrix, and integrating reflection intensities requires precise knowledge of the location of these sensors in three-dimensional space. For this reason, a portion of this tutorial describes the calibration and refinement of the tile metrology.

Pyana

The LCLS Data Acquisition Systems stream the terabytes of diffraction data collected from the CS-PAD detector to container files in XTC format. XTC is a linear, non-random access file format, where individual images can be recorded rapidly by the file system as they are collected. The programmatic interface to interact with these files at LCLS is psana and pyana. Pyana is driven by config files to process frames individually, and is designed with computational parallelization in mind. As each image is independent, processing of each image can be done by separate computer cores. Cctbx.xfel uses pyana and pyana config files to read and process image files stored in XTC format. Hits are converted to separate files for each individual image. At the moment these separate files are in a in a python-programming language pickle. However, by the end of 2013, cctbx.xfel will be exclusively using CBF and HDF5 formats.

Phil

While pyana is configured using its own .cfg files, cctbx.xfel itself is driven using Python-based hierarchical interchange language (phil) files, the same format that drives Labelit and Phenix (though Phenix calls them .eff files). The format is intuitive and allows easy specification of per-processing run parameters.

Cctbx

The computational crystallographic toolbox is a foundational set of python and C++ modules that allow abstraction of the crystallographic experiment. Under continual development, the toolbox provides interfaces for working with crystal models, reflection data, and much more.