DIALS core meeting 2025-10-23

Previous Actions

• ND Investigate getting psana tests running on the DIALS xfel-regression testing
• ND: Move dials.diamond.ac.uk to a redirect to dials.github.io

Agenda

DIALS Metrics on github.io

• Can play with the power BI page
• Similar page for deposition incoming, by year / institute etc. - working out now how to integrate with the RST for dials.github.io pages.
• Discussed https://github.com/dials/dials/pull/3000
• With better title/extra newsfragment removed, not reason not to merge
• ND to look at Jenkins job
• Consider github action to generate this
  • Now working

DIALS Office Hours

• 3pm Thursdays was what we talked about
• ND talk to JBE about running
• Make informal promise for office hours, and a slack channel that people can make known that they have a request to chat/for help about a particular topic
• JBE booked room, not sent out invites/ zoom yet - try to get done in next week.
  • Consider sending reminder to slack day before advertising
  • James to follow up with advert to non-Diamond people as it is happening already at DLS
• Graeme suggested “themes” for the office hours
• James to follow up
• Diamond “User open hours” under discussion
• Talk about having two office hours, AB indicates that this should be possible
  • Some discussion about time offset, suggest 8h off between West/East

Metrics

• 2025-09-25 - dxtbx-side merged in, nothing yet in DIALS side to push it into the mtz history https://github.com/cctbx/dxtbx/pull/816
• Needs to be work to put in on DIALS side
• Work to do:
  • Need to package history into MTZ, but MTZ history not the right place. Decided MTZ-appendix is the right place to put this in, but work not started yet
  • Aaron has offered Yang’s skills as his work should cover this area
  • Write integrate and scale history to MTZ #2924
  • David to dig relevant information out
• MTZ Appendix: Some controversy
  • Phenix/DIALS not included in discussions
  • Fundamental technological issues
    • Mixing MTZ/CIF
• Gemmi supports

iota and Prime

• Both developers moved on
• Iota: trouble configuring on recent python versions
• DIALS pulls from conda-forge directly
  • This would be a solution for XFEL
• Prime easier to drop but defer decision
  • Aaron to ask Mona what she wants to do with Prime (still on to-do)
• Dan has made progress!
  • Mona happy to sunset prime
  • Dan has moved cctbx_project/prime into it’s own separate folder
  • cleaning up some left over references
  • Remove from DIALS bootstrap

AOAOB

• Hamburg: imageset, sequences, laziness so it works on 100,000 image HDF5 files
• Did some work in a branch to get stills_process to use imagesequences
• Nick did some work to eliminate need for check_format
• All of this is in branches that have not been revisited
• Discussion about still goniometer dogma

ImageSequence vs ImageSet

• Marko is working on an NXmx-like format class for SerialED, where the beam position changes each image
• It seems not possible to use ImageSequence for this, as it does not allow different models per image. Is this correct?
• ImageSet works, but import and viewing images is much slower
• Is there a long term plan to converge to just one of these classes, with all performance and feature issues fixed?
• Suggestion to look at DMcD properties table
• Discussion about serialization/deserialization overhead, brief discussion of using another form e.g. hdf5 or sqlite (for Experiment Lists).
• Discussion of existing uses of mixin inheritance

Dials data download failures

• CI failing due to data downloads
• Does dials-data retry?
• ND has recollection that DGW was looking at this?
• Possibly more agressive retention of caches?
• Moved DGW to admin to allow to bypass failures due to incorrect download
• Possibly: Need to check status code on file download?
• Discussion: Worth hosting on LBL?
• DGW to make ticket to discuss, work out what would be best to move

Neutrons

• AB had email from Aaron Finke to ask about analysis - when a stable DIALS release that supports neutrons
  • DMcD working on last merges
  • Both TOF and Laue being worked on
  • Move this to top of next agenda so can discuss with DMcD available
• AB has task to set up meeting next week, will try to involve interested parties (e.g. David’s)
  • Had this meeting!
  • Conclusion: Aaron Finke/group Willing to support
  • David McDonagh will finish committing work on Neutrons
  • They will pick up when ready

AOB

APS Workshop

• GW had conversation about expanding workshop scope. Was half-day, thought maybe a full day - scope expanded to e.g. serial processing
• May 4th-8th 2026 two half-days of DIALS workshop probably
• Some travel funding available, potentially from outside US

MCD outlier rejection

Next meeting

Thursday, November 6th, 4pm (GMT), 8am (PST), 10am (CST)