Files
Jungfraujoch/docs/DEPLOYMENT.md
T
leonarski_fandClaude Opus 5 46930142dd docs: write down what a release ships
Nothing said what is in a release or what it needs of the machine it lands on: that the
Linux binaries are built -march=x86-64-v3 and the Windows ones /arch:AVX, so each has a
CPU floor; that the portable .tgz is built on RHEL 8 for its glibc; that the Windows
installer is MSVC (Visual Studio 2026), CUDA 13.3, Qt 6.11 and carries the Qt runtime;
and above all what the CUDA variants need. Only cuFFT is linked dynamically, and it has
no link-time dependency on the driver library, so a CUDA build starts on a machine with
no NVIDIA GPU at all and falls back to the CPU path - as long as cuFFT can be loaded,
which the .tgz and the installer arrange by shipping it and the distribution packages
arrange through the distribution's own CUDA packages. Collected into a new page rather
than scattered over the install instructions.

The repository page had the RHEL 9 rows pointing at el8 paths under the wrong slsdet
number, no rows at all for the two slsdet9 repositories the pipeline uploads, a driver
package named jfjoch-driver where it is jfjoch-driver-dkms, and a note that RPMs are
unsigned from before the pipeline started uploading them with sign=true.

The FPGA page had a paragraph that stopped mid-sentence, in the middle of a link, and a
section describing a firmware build triggered by commit message. The firmware is stable
and carried from version to version now.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-03 20:53:19 +02:00

7.4 KiB

Deployment

To deploy Jungfraujoch, one needs to follow four steps:

  1. Install main Jungfraujoch code and frontend web interface
  2. Flash the U55C FPGA card with a proper image and install Linux kernel driver
  3. Install Jungfraujoch writer
  4. Install Python OpenAPI client

Installation procedure depend a lot on the operating system. For RedHat Enterprise Linux 8/9, Rocky 8/9, Ubuntu 22.04/24.04 or compatible, installation can be done with prebuilt packages from the package repositories and is relatively straightforward. For other systems one needs to build software from source. Both ways will be presented. What each released package contains, and what it needs on the machine, is described in Release contents.

Install main Jungfraujoch code and frontend web interface

On RHEL 8 systems there is a jfjoch-<version>-1.el8.x86_64.rpm that needs to be installed and contains all the necessary software and web interface.

On other OSes one needs to compile Jungfraujoch from source (from the repo directory):

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=<directory to install>
$ make
$ sudo make install  

For manual installation, we recommend to use non-standard directory (like /opt/jfjoch), to facilitate upgrades and removal. For DKMS to manage kernel module sources it is necessary to copy driver sources to /usr/src/jfjoch-<VERSION> directory. This requires extra flag in cmake -DJFJOCH_INSTALL_DRIVER_SOURCE=ON.

Frontend web user interface has to be built separately with:

$ cd build
$ make frontend

Frontend files (.html and .js) will be placed in frontend/dist (outside of build/ directory!) and has to be copied to a general location, e.g. /usr/local/jfjoch/frontend or /opt/jfjoch/frotend.

Flash the U55C FPGA card with a proper image and install Linux kernel driver.

Firmware flashing

  1. Check that the card is detected by OS with "lspci |grep Xilinx" and check the PCIe bus/device/function (BDF) number, 11:00.0 in this case:
$ lspci |grep Xilinx
23:00.0 Processing accelerators: Xilinx Corporation Device 3450 (rev 2)

Note the device number 3450 that identifies Jungfraujoch device (Jungfraujoch pass is 3450 m above sea level) and rev 2 identifying release of the firmware.

  1. Check the speed of the card, that it is detected as PCIe Gen4x8 device (needs to be done as root, otherwise configuration details are not given):
$ sudo lspci -vv -s <PCIe slot number>
23:00.0 Processing accelerators: Xilinx Corporation Device 3450
(...)
LnkSta:     Speed 16GT/s (ok), Width x8 (ok)
(...)
  1. Download the MCS image from release files or build it using Vivado (WARNING! building time can be about 8 hours and doesn't allways reach correct timing).
  2. Flash the card with xbflash.qspi tool (part of Jungfraujoch). For fresh card use:
sudo xbflash.qspi --primary <path to MCS file> --card <PCIe slot from above> --bar-offset 0x1f06000 

For card that was already flashed with Jungfraujoch images:

sudo xbflash.qspi --primary <path to MCS file> --card <PCIe slot from above>

It is necessary to confirm the operation by pressing Y key or one can add --force option to avoid confirmation. It is safe to run multiple flashing processes in parallel for different cards, for example in separate screen sessions.

  1. Cold reboot:
sudo ipmitool chassis power cycle

Install PCIe driver

For first run it is though recommended to try the driver without installing to the kernel directory:

$ cd fpga/pcie_driver
$ make
$ sudo insmod jfjoch.ko

Check with dmesg that the device was properly found:

$ dmesg |grep jfjoch
[  431.624933] jfjoch 0000:23:00.0: enabling device (0140 -> 0142)
[  431.919147] misc jfjoch0: Jungfraujoch FPGA loaded with FW build: 5610030a

If things work, it is recommended to install the driver with DKMS, so it is rebuilt for kernel updates. On RHEL 8 you can install the prebuilt jfjoch-driver-dkms package from the Gitea package registry. On other systems follow procedure in PCIe driver.

NOTE: Driver installation procedure on non-RHEL 8 systems is not well understood/optimized at the moment.

NOTE: In case driver is included in the init RAM-disk image, it is necessary to rebuild the RAM-disk if driver is updated:

$ sudo dracut -f

Configure network

Configure switch according to FPGA network guide - specifically set manual speed and turn off auto-negotiation for the port used to connect U55C card and connect card to switch.

Running Jungfraujoch software

Main Jungfraujoch service is called jfjoch_broker. It is responsible for handling data from FPGAs, doing processing, analysis, compression and sending images on ZeroMQ output. It is recommended to run the service as systemd service.

jfjoch_broker takes two parameters: JSON configuration file and HTTP port (default is 5232). Example JSON files are placed in etc/ folder. JSON file format is also explained in the OpenAPI definition, as jfjoch_settings data structure.

When running the service can be accessed via HTTP interface from a web browser for configuration and monitoring.

Jungfraujoch automatically uses every GPU visible to the process and spreads the per-image work across all of them. To run more than one jfjoch_broker on a single machine, each confined to a disjoint subset of GPUs, set CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES; setting CUDA_DEVICE_ORDER=PCI_BUS_ID keeps the GPU indices stable across reboots. For example, two brokers on a 4-GPU host:

CUDA_DEVICE_ORDER=PCI_BUS_ID CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0,1 jfjoch_broker broker_a.json 5232
CUDA_DEVICE_ORDER=PCI_BUS_ID CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=2,3 jfjoch_broker broker_b.json 5233

To prepare the configuration file one also needs to reference calibration files: gain files for PSI JUNGFRAU and trim-bit files for PSI EIGER. These need to be obtained from the PSI Detector Group.

Card verification

To test that FPGA board is working properly without access to a JUNGFRAU detector, you can use jfjoch_fpga_test tool. For example to simulate 10M pixel system with 4 FPGA cards and 200k images on a 2 CPU system with 2 GPUs:

jfjoch_fpga_test ~/nextgendcu/ -m20 -s4 -i 200000

Or 1M pixel system with one FPGA card:

jfjoch_fpga_test ~/nextgendcu/ -m2 -s1 -i 200000

Install Jungfraujoch writer

Jungfraujoch writer is an additional service, that can connect to jfjoch_broker ZeroMQ interface and writes files according to NeXus/NXmx HDF5 standard.

At the moment it is better to have a separate machine, with access to distributed file system, for writing images.

Writer can be installed with a dedicated RPM file or compiled from source. For compilation, you can use the following commands:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DJFJOCH_WRITER_ONLY=ON -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=<directory to install> ..
make jfjoch

Install Jungfraujoch image viewer

Jungfraujoch viewer is X-ray diffraction image viewer, that is optimized to open Jungfraujoch HDF5 files.

The viewer is a Qt application and it requires recent version of the library, therefore it is an optional dependency.

To include it in the building of Jungfraujoch use -DJFJOCH_VIEWER_BUILD=ON directive for CMake:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DJFJOCH_VIEWER_BUILD=ON -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=<directory to install> ..
make jfjoch

Install Jungfraujoch Python client

Use pip:

pip install jfjoch-client