Mission Statement

The Mission Statement for the group and its units (Accelerator Control, Beamline Control, Data Analysis) is to:

• Provide software, support, maintenance, development and expertise capabilities for software in the areas of control, data acquisition and data analysis for the Experiments Division, Accelerator and Source Division, Technical Services and internally within ISDD.

• Act, when required, as Coordinator with other support services (Electronics Group, Computing Services and Technical Services) for interventions on beamlines or accelerator systems.

• Provide services in choosing and writing software to control the accelerator and beamline and experiments. Provide coherent software for doing experiments, from the setup of the experiment, the sample positioning and environment, the data acquisition and online and offline data analysis.

• Work in Project Teams with other ESRF groups to provide fully integrated software for instrumentation.

• All software built by the ISDD group is wherever appropriate open source software which can be downloaded by external users or other institutes.

• Select and maintain computer tools for designing, building and maintaining software.

• Define a long term strategy, establish a software roadmap for the future.

1. Software Expertise Teams mission is to :

• Provide software expertise in a specific area to other members of the Software Service Group.

• Develop and maintain software which is common to two or more units.

• The Team members are flexible and will be part of the team for as long as they are needed. The teams which can be identified today are :

o Device drivers for VME and PC hardware
o Tango libraries, tools and common device servers
o 2D detector common platform, driver, servers and tools
o Data format definition and implementation
o 1D, 2D and 3D Visualisation of data
o User interfaces to common tools e.g. data navigator, analysis,
o Grid, High Performance and Graphical Processor computing.

2. Role of all Software Developers

Projects

• Act as project-managers in software projects (design, development, installation and maintenance) as assigned by the respective unit or group heads.

• Act as project team members as assigned by their unit or group heads
  

Development

• Keep a watch on the external technical developments in the field of software relevant to their area of competence and of general interest for the ESRF.

• Propose and develop in collaboration with other members of the group, software for beamlines and/or the accelerator control system.

• Maintain and develop further software for which the group is collectively responsible.

• All developments are in principle considered open source and are stored in to the common source code repository of the group.