DECTRIS CLOUD powered the hands-on tutorial at the TexTOM workshop (Feb 10–12, 2025, CIRM, Marseille) organized by Tilman Grünewald, enabling 44 participants to seamlessly run a full 3D Texture Tomography reconstruction and visualization pipeline in the cloud. With access to a preconfigured TexTOM environment on DECTRIS CLOUD, participants could instantly leverage cutting-edge processing and analysis workflows, enabling them to focus on science rather than technical setup.
The TexTOM workshop, dedicated to the analysis of texture tomography of materials from X-Ray diffraction data, took place at the Centre International de Rencontres Mathématiques (CIRM) in Marseille, France, from February 10–12, 2025. Through a series of poster and oral presentations, participants explored the latest advancements in instrumentation, workflows and insights gained from texture tomography experiments. The workshop opened with an in-depth exploration of the TexTOM software package [1] guided by Moritz Frewein, developed by Tilman Grünewald’s research group at the Institut Fresnel, Marseille. Expanding on this, Max Burian, DECTRIS CLOUD Product Lead, presented how cloud technology can enable new scientific workflows while empowering collaboration during data analysis and discovery.
The first afternoon session featured a hands-on tutorial, where participants followed the complete TexTOM data reconstruction pipeline, from integrated synchrotron data to a full 3D reconstruction visualized in ParaView. This session was made possible through DECTRIS CLOUD, which provided each participant with access to a high-performance compute node and simultaneous access to a 150 GB integrated synchrotron data set. Using a TexTom software environment preconfigured by Tilman and his team, attendees could focus entirely on scientific workflows without concerns about software installation or system setup.
“Hosting a hands-on workshop of this scale would have been nearly impossible without the support of DECTRIS CLOUD. Providing each participant with instant access to high-performance computing resources allowed us to focus on the scientific underpinning rather than the technical setup.” - Tilman Grünewald, TexTom Workshop organizer and developer of the TexTom software package
The successful execution of the tutorial session highlights how DECTRIS CLOUD can enable scientific collaborations. By offering shareable environments, researchers, developers, and beamline scientists can provide ready-to-use configurations for scientific software, significantly lowering the barrier to entry for complex analyses. Furthermore, the event showcased the potential of scalable cloud computing, with DECTRIS CLOUD providing ~40 nodes with 64 CPUs each (AMD EPYC 4th gen), amounting to ~2,500 simultaneous CPUs, for the duration of the workshop.
Registered users can request access to the TexTOM environment, configured by Tilman Grünewald, directly on the DECTRIS CLOUD platform. Sign up at app.dectris.cloud to explore it today.
References
[1] Frewein, M. P. K., Mason, J., Maier, B., Colfen, H., Medjahed, A., Burghammer, M., Allain, M. & Grünewald, T. A. (2024). IUCrJ, 11, 809-820. DOI: 10.1107/S2052252524006547
https://journals.iucr.org/m/issues/2024/05/00/fc5079/index.html
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