In many cases, these software packages are “research code”: works in progress written by scientists, not software developers, who are willing to share their effort with other scientists. Users frequently find that obtaining and running such software can be difficult and time consuming. In response, researchers at CHESS have been contributing to a new open-source package manager developed by Continuum Analytics called “Conda”, which provides simple access to a wide variety of scientific software packages written in C, Fortran, Python, R, etc. Developers of scientific software specify a project’s dependencies, and conda compiles and packages the software for Windows, Linux, or OSX, and uploads the result for distribution. Users can use a graphical user interface to install scientific software with a single button click, or use a single command to install via the command line. CHESS researchers have been collaborating with colleagues at European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, Technical University of Denmark, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Air Force Research Laboratory, and Continuum Analytics to develop and distribute software for scanning x-ray fluorescence microscopy and three-dimensional high-energy x-ray diffraction microscopy. Additional software will be available in the near future. For more information, see http://www.chess.cornell.edu/software/anaconda/index.htm.
CHESS provides a simple new method for users to obtain scientific software
CHESS supports a wide variety of x-ray techniques, many of which require use of multiple sophisticated, highly-specialized software packages to form a data analysis “pipeline” to reduce and process the data generated here.
