Over 2017 the CCPi (http://www.ccpi.ac.uk/) had an active round of networking and outreach meetings for X-ray CT, culminating with a recognition dinner held at the Royal Geographical Society.

In the start of 2017 we provided a Letter of Support for a DOE project proposed by Kitware inc., as well as submitted our own CCP Flagship proposal. Both were awarded, creating an extra 6 FTE RSE in the UK and 5.1 FTE RSE (Research Software Engineers) in the USA until 2020.
Following this success we were left with a concern that there were no face-to-face networking funds, but alternative electronic systems were being considered until serendipity! – the EPSRC launched a grant with the support of the SSI (Software Sustainability Institute), to ask for travel and subsistence to foster collaborations between research software engineers on both sides of the pond. We applied and had a two week face-to-face collaboration with one of the main Kitware Inc. lead developers, Dr Marcus Hanwell. The topics focussed on their new Tomviz software product (https://www.tomviz.org/): a purpose built open source application that can manage – the data collection; noise filtering, reconstruction, visualisation and final analysis of tomography data.

Talks, facility tours (university labs, ISIS (IMAT) and Diamond (i13) beamlines) and software installation sessions occurred, at RAL (Atlas Visualisation Facility), DL (Hartree Centre visualisation suite) and the University of Manchester (HMXIF) and were enabled by the current extensive CCPi network.

The CCPi now has a presence at three major annual imaging events in the country; each having 50+ attendees. These include an X-Ray user group symposium (ToScA) managed by the National History Museum (NHM) and Royal Microscopical Society (RMS), a technical forum supported by RCaH and DLS; and a “dimensional XCT” conference supported by NPL that is leading to formal BSI/ISO standards.

In 2018, for this UK-USA collaboration, we are looking at new user guides to be created, an open day for software show-and-tell event at RAL and further direct collaboration between the newly recruited software developers to share code and best practice; as well as links to other CCPs involving tomography type data. A follow on impact showcase event will be organised under the EPSRC RSE & ARCHER umbrella on Tuesday 24 April 2018.