Jungfraujoch/docs/NAMING.md

# Naming

The software is Swiss, and so are its names: both halves of the system are named after
places in the Alps that are, in one way or another, about moving a *lot* of something up a
steep mountain as efficiently as possible — usually by train. Throughput, in other words.

| Part | Name | What it does |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Streaming / acquisition | **Jungfraujoch** | Receives detector data at high data rates, runs the FPGA/GPU pipeline, and streams images out for writing. |
| Data processing | **Rugnux** | Offline crystallographic analysis of a stored dataset — indexing, integration, scaling and merging (the [`rugnux`](RUGNUX.md) tool). |

## Jungfraujoch

The **Jungfraujoch** is a high mountain col in the Bernese Alps, the saddle (*Joch* is German
for "yoke" or "col") between the peaks **Jungfrau** and **Mönch**, at 3,466 m. It is the site of
the [High Altitude Research Station Jungfraujoch](https://www.hfsjg.ch/), whose long-running
atmospheric measurements are **co-operated by the Paul Scherrer Institute** — the same institute
that develops this software and the JUNGFRAU detector.

The name is also a small piece of word-play. PSI's **JUNGFRAU** detector and DECTRIS's **EIGER**
detector are both named after Bernese Alps peaks (the famous trio is *Eiger*, *Mönch*, *Jungfrau*).
The Jungfraujoch — the pass *between* Jungfrau and Mönch — is where those two detector worlds meet.

And it fits the theme of the whole project: the Jungfraujoch is reached by the **Jungfraubahn**,
whose terminus is the **highest railway station in Europe** (3,454 m, the "Top of Europe"). It is
the closest you can get to that summit in a genuinely *high-throughput* way — by train, moving
crowds up the mountain — which is exactly what the streaming side of this software does with
detector frames.

**Pronunciation (German):** *Jungfraujoch* ≈ **YUNG-frow-yokh**.
"Jung" as in *young*, "frau" rhymes with *cow*, and the final "joch" ends in the guttural *ch* of
Scottish *loch* or German *Bach* — not a hard *k*.

## Rugnux

**Piz Rugnux** is a mountain in the Rhaetian Alps of canton Graubünden, in south-eastern
Switzerland. (*Piz* is the Romansh word for "peak".) It rises above the **Albula line** of the
**Rhaetian Railway** (*Rhätische Bahn*), part of the "Rhaetian Railway in the Albula / Bernina
Landscapes" — a **UNESCO World Heritage Site** (*Welterbe*).

That stretch of line is a masterpiece of throughput engineering: to climb a great deal of altitude
in very little horizontal distance, it corkscrews through a series of **helical (spiral) tunnels**
looping back inside the mountains. It is, again, the Swiss art of getting an enormous amount up a
steep mountain efficiently — the same idea the data-processing side of this software is built
around: pushing a large volume of diffraction data through the analysis pipeline.

So the theme is consistent — **Swiss mountains, trains, and throughput** — while keeping the two
subsystems clearly distinct: *Jungfraujoch* streams, *Rugnux* processes.

**Pronunciation (Romansh):** *Piz Rugnux* ≈ **peets roo-NYOOKS**.
The "gn" is a soft palatal *ñ*, as in *canyon* or Italian *gnocchi*, not two separate sounds.

## What is Romansh?

**Romansh** (*Rumantsch*) is the **fourth national language of Switzerland**, alongside German,
French and Italian. It is a Romance language — a direct descendant of the spoken Latin left behind
in the Alpine valleys — today spoken by only a few tens of thousands of people, almost all in the
canton of Graubünden. It survives in several regional idioms, brought together in a standard form
called *Rumantsch Grischun*. Naming the processing engine with a Romansh mountain is a small nod to
the least-spoken but no-less-Swiss corner of the country.