STATUS OF THE ULTRA FAST TOMOGRAPHY EXPERIMENTS CONTROL AT ANKA

X-ray imaging permits to spatially resolve the 2D and 3D structure in materials and organisms, which is crucial for the understanding of their properties. Additional temporal resolution of structure evolution gives access to dynamics of processes and allows to understand functionality of devices and organisms with the goal to optimize technological processes. Such time-resolved dynamic analysis of micro-sized structures is now possible by aid of ultrafast tomography, as being developed at the TopoTomo beamline of the synchrotron light source ANKA. At TopoTomo, the whole experimental workflow has been significantly improved in order to decrease the total duration of a tomography experiment down to the range of minutes. To meet these requirements, detectors and the computing infrastructure have been optimized, comprising a Tango-based control system for ultra fast tomography with a data throughput of several 100 MB/s. Multi-GPU based computing allows for high speed data processing by using a special reconstruction scheme. Furthermore the data management infrastructure will allow for a life cycle management of data sets accumulating several TByte/day. The final concept will also be part of the IMAGE beamline, which is going to be installed in 2013.