DIALS core meeting 2025-11-06

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
• 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 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

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)