Macromolecular crystallography is an experimental technique allowing to explore 3D atomic structure of proteins, used by academics for research in biology and by pharmaceutical companies in rational drug design. While up to now development of the technique was limited by scientific instruments performance, recently computing performance becomes a key limitation. In his presentation Filip will present a computing challenge to handle 18 GB/s data stream coming from the new X-ray detector. He will show his experiences in applying conventional hardware for the task and why this attempt failed. He will then present how IC 922 server with OpenCAPI enabled FPGA boards allowed to build a sustainable and scalable solution for high speed data acquisition. Finally, he will give a perspective, how the advancement in hardware development will enable better science by users of the Swiss Light Source.
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