Recent advances in detector technology, combined with continuous 2D Piezo scanning, are posing a significant challenge on data analysis. With the EigerX 4M detector by Dectris, for example, four million single-photon counting pixels can be read out at 750 Hz frame rate. Although compressed, this yields a data stream of roughly 100 MB per second. For analysis, data need to be uncompressed, yielding a data rate of more than 6 GB per second. To deal with the data obtained at such high rates in scanning transmission x-ray microscopy (STXM) measurements, we have developed a dedicated STXM analysis cluster, the “Heinzelmännchen system”. With a special software, 24 computing nodes can process up to 3 500 EigerX frames per second, i.e. about four times as fast as the data is acquired. This allows for new algorithms to be developed, when datasets need to be processed multiple times in iterative schemes.

Topics
Data streams, Optical metrology, X-ray microscopy
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2019
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