Introduction

The PAWS package aims to provide a fast and lean platform for building and executing workflows for data processing. It was originally developed to process scattering and diffraction images for research purposes at SLAC/SSRL. At the core of PAWS is a library of operations, which are essentially interfaces for other useful Python packages.

Some of the core interests of PAWS:

• Portable workflows:

  equally useful for scripting at home, for sending code to your colleagues, for performing computations behind applications, or for remote execution of large jobs on high-performance clusters.

• Scalable workflows:

  develop and test on one sample, scale up to thousands without hitting barriers.

• Flexible plugins:

  plug-and-play clients for communicating with experimental equipment, moving data to and from databases or filesystems, communicating with remote PAWS instances, or anything else that should happen outside of your workflows.

The PAWS developers would love to hear from you if you have wisdom, haikus, bugs, artwork, or suggestions. Get in touch with us at paws-developers@slac.stanford.edu.