Powered by Indico
v3.2.9
The Mantid Developer Meeting and User Workshop will be held Monday 3rd to Thursday 6th November, 2025 at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK.
The week will start with the Developer Meeting (Monday 3rd November for three days), giving an opportunity for the various development teams to meet to discuss the latest issues connected with the development of Mantid. The meeting will include the popular 'What has always bugged me about Mantid is ...' activity. It will also include presentations as part of the afternoon sessions. The developer meeting will be open to new and experienced developers contributing to Mantid. It is unlikely be of interest to the wider user community.
The week will continue on Thursday 6th November with a User Workshop. All Users and Developers are welcome to attend this meeting, which will include a mixture of scientific and technical talks, updates about the Mantid project and discussion about upcoming features. Note that this has recently been revised to run as a one day meeting.
In-person places at the Developer Meeting are now full but you can still sign up to attend remotely. The User Meeting will be Hybrid throughout. Please indicate how you would like to participate in the meeting when you register.
In person session at the developers meeting
Receive badges at the Visitor Centre
Please note this is separate from registering for the facility. Please allow enough time for facility registration before Visitor Badging.
Badges will be required for lunch.
TBC
An overview of the developer meeting and what to expect
Split into groups for the icebreaker Two Truths, One Lie
In person session at the developers meeting
Facility updates aimed at Developers
Badges required
In person session at the developers meeting
Talk from Caila about recent Hackathon at ISIS and set up for the activity
In person session at the developers meeting
Includes feedback and summary
In person session at the developers meeting
Attendees need to bring a laptop capable of making changes to Mantid or have access to a remote machine that can.
The exact topics for the code camps are dynamic and will be determined by the attendees during the meeting.
Badges required
In person session at the developers meeting with remote attendees (hybrid)
Demonstration and Discussion of the current state of play of texture reduction in mantid
Most major facilities using Mantid run data analysis servers for their users. In many cases these are cloud-based virtual machines (VMs) which are allocated to a single user. The specifications of these VMs are often defined by the most computationally expensive tasks required so in many simpler cases they are underused. Furthermore they are often idle as users are waiting for data or simply forget to shut down the VMs when they are done. The advantage of these systems is that users don't have to install any software or to download their data. This can also be achieved more efficiently with a file server (for the data) and a WebAssembly/Javascript app where the computations are carried on the user's own computer. In this presentation I show how the Mantid Framework can be compiled to WebAssembly (wasm)[1] and run in-browser using the Pyodide Python distribution. Some Mantid GUI interfaces were ported by using a wrapper layer which replaces qtpy with code which translates the PyQt/PySide calls to Javascript using the OS.js environment. This saves having to compile Qt and PySide to wasm (which is possible). The disadvantage of this approach is that it is limited to 4GB of memory as wasm is a 32-bit platform, but the target here is for less compute-intensive "first look" applications. The prototype implementation also does not support threading although this is possible with wasm. [1] https://github.com/mducle/micromantid
In person session at the developers meeting with remote attendees (hybrid)
Most files used for neutron data in Mantid use the NeXus format (.nxs), which specifies a common file structure for neutron, X-ray, and muon scattering data. For many years, Mantid has relied on the NeXus API (NAPI) to handle all elements of reading and writing. However, NAPI development is no longer supported, and the API has not been updated in almost a decade. To move Mantid forward, we need to take ownership of our own file IO. Major work for releases 6.13 and 6.14 completely removed reliance on NAPI, building a new framework in HDF5 directly. This talk will cover the new system, caveats to maintaining it, and also mention the difficult process of phasing out highly prolific legacy code.
A presentation detailing the methodology SNAPRed (https://github.com/neutrons/SNAPRed) used to approach handling of run data, its ancillary data objects, and how this interacts with the Mantid API.
Scientific software projects increasingly combine Python with C++, GPU toolkits, and other native dependencies, creating challenges for reproducibility, deployment, and cross-platform support. Traditional tools—Conda, Poetry, uv, Hatch, and PDM—address parts of this problem but leave gaps in speed, determinism, or multi-language integration. Pixi, a new environment manager built on Conda and conda-forge, combines multi-language package support with modern Rust-based performance and reproducibility features. It installs compiled libraries and compilers alongside Python packages, automatically maintains lockfiles, and ensures deterministic environments across Linux, macOS, and Windows. Pixi’s high-performance solver accelerates dependency resolution while unifying Conda and PyPI packages. For deployment, Pixi offers portable environment archives, lightweight single-binary installs, and official container support, simplifying CI/CD pipelines and reducing environment drift. Compared to alternatives, Pixi provides speed, reproducibility, and multi-language capabilities that make it especially suited for scientific and HPC workflows.
In person session at the developers meeting
Badge required
In person session at the developers meeting with remote attendees (hybrid)
An opportunity to discuss and strategise on
In person session at the developers meeting with remote attendees (hybrid)
A 5 minute lightening talk
Following on from Oleksandr's LLM talk and Jose's Coderrabbitai talk we will open the floor to a general discussion on developers using AI as a tool for developing Mantid.
User meeting
For the User Meeting
Discussion session
Part of the SWG discussion session
In RAL restaurant with coffee in meeting room
User meeting
User meeting