DIALS core meeting 2025-11-06
Previous Actions
- ND Investigate getting
psanatests running on the DIALS xfel-regression testing - ND: Move dials.diamond.ac.uk to a redirect to dials.github.io
- ND: Remove from DIALS bootstrap dials/dials#3030
- DGW: Make issue to discuss moving of dials-data to more appropriate place.
Agenda
DIALS Release 3.26
- Out
- .xz size ballooned from 400 MB DIALS 3.24 -> 1.7 GB
- Seems to have pulled in all of CUDA-runtime now?
- It’s ffbidx.
- People generally begrudgingly okay with it.
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
- Jame advertised today! There is a weekly reminder in slack now, close this off.
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
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
- Probably table for new year
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
ImageSequencefor this, as it does not allow different models per image. Is this correct? ImageSetworks, 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
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
- Discussion about https://github.com/dials/dials/pull/2676, ND connection degraded and had to leave
- Was merged in, AB not 100% convinced but could be useful in some cases.
AOB
- General offer from Dan Paley for DIALS West to take over any release process work that could be supported
- Note that after new Optuna dependency was added this caused scrambling on DIALS west side, as some separate dependency lists maintained
- PSAna2 PRs
- https://github.com/cctbx/dxtbx/pull/860
- https://github.com/dials/dials/pull/3038
- DIALS East to have a look at in next week
Next meeting
Thursday, November 20th, 4pm (GMT), 8am (PST), 10am (CST)