FOXMAS( Fast Online X-ray Micro-diffraction Analysis Services) provide fast online services of X-ray micro-diffraction data analysis and result visualizations. Designed to be accessed through Science Studio, users can input their analysis parameters and submit data analysis requests through a web interface.

The analysis will then be conducted by HPC facilities provided by SHARCNET. FOXMAS currently runs on the cluster Prickly. Using the computational power of Prickly, especially the Cell processors, the accelerated analysis can reach speeds of up to 60 times faster than a desktop using the regular IDL software package, depending on the size of the images and the number of computation nodes used on Prickly.

FOXMAS currently supports analysis of X-ray Micro-diffraction data collected from various X-ray area detectors, including Princeton CCD X-ray detector, MAR 133 CCD detector and DECTRIS Pilatus 1M Pixel array detector.

FOXMAS provides general functions for X-ray Micro-diffraction data analysis, including peak searching, indexing and strain refinement. To further enhance the analysis results, FOXMAS has also adopted some additional functions from XMAS, including background subtraction and re-indexing (i.e. fit missing peaks).

In addition to the high performance online analysis of the data, FOXMAS also provides online mapping services to enable users to visualize the analysis results with various maps for the sample area from which X-ray micro-diffraction data has been collected, such as grain orientation maps, strain tensor maps, etc.