Transitioning existing data reduction workflows at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source to Galaxy

The X-ray Imaging of Microstructures Gateway (XIMG) has been developed for the structural materials community at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS). High energy synchrotron X-ray diffraction and imaging techniques continue to push the limits of what can be captured spatially and temporally in evolving microstructures, leading to massive datasets (>TBs) and complex data reduction and analysis workflows. Most first-time users are not prepared for the magnitude of scientific computing expertise required to complete data reduction and analysis in this field. By adopting the Galaxy-based Science Gateway framework, this barrier can be reduced so scientists can focus on what the software is doing, rather than how it is doing it.

We will demonstrate our effort on transitioning existing data reduction and analysis workflows to process synchrotron data into the Galaxy framework. This work is part of a restructuring of current software from dedicated scripts, often highly customized to a specific experiment or beam line, to one that is composed of individual, loosely coupled, components that can be reused and combined into data reduction pipelines. In addition to lowering barriers, this pipeline concept facilitates tracking data reduction provenance and  metadata to allow sharing of datasets among the community.