The XIMG (X-ray Imaging of Microstructures Gateway) project is a multi-institute collaboration funded by NSF to create cyberinfrastructure that accelerates discovery in materials science. The new science gateway will make it possible for materials science researchers worldwide to study the behavior of new and existing materials using x-ray diffraction.
The goal of the XIMG (pronounced X-image) project is to provide a web-based interface that:
- Simplifies collection and analysis of high-energy x-ray diffraction data
- Provides computational and storage resources that support detailed strain analysis
- Provides easy access to leading edge software for efficient data analysis
- Supports development of new tools for analysis of microcrystalline data
- Makes those tools accessible to the global research community
The XIMG Science Gateway will be an online resource that provides researchers everywhere with tools to examine high energy x-ray data collected from beamlines at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) as well as other synchrotrons around the world. A single experiment at CHESS using high energy x-rays generates terabytes of high-fidelity scattering data. XIMG will provide tools to examine these large datasets in the presence of software and compute power available through the NSF-funded Expanse and Comet supercomputers at SDSC. This will allow scientists and engineers to analyze data that are currently difficult or impossible to access online.
Science gateways make it possible to run available applications on supercomputers such as SDSC’s Expanse system, allowing researchers to focus on their scientific problems without having to learn the details of how supercomputers work.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently awarded a $1 million Research Advanced by Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering (RAISE) grant to a multidisciplinary team of researchers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California San Diego, the University of Minnesota, Carnegie Mellon University, and Cornell University.