LIGHTFALL
A modern, unified control platform for synchrotron lightsource facilities. API-first, plugin-based, and built to be driven by operators and AI agents alike. In commissioning at COSMIC-Scattering.
CAMERA · AMCR · LAWRENCE BERKELEY NATIONAL LABORATORY
Ronald J. Pandolfi
I build control systems and scientific software for synchrotron beamlines at the Advanced Light Source: control UIs, autonomous experiment orchestration, and the infrastructure that keeps instruments and their software reproducible.
HALBACH AWARDInnovative Instrumentation · COSMIC-Scattering
R&D 100gpCAM
Role
- CAMERA · AMCR
- Computer Systems Engineer in CAMERA, the Center for Advanced Mathematics for Energy Research Applications, part of Berkeley Lab's Applied Mathematics and Computational Research Division. I turn applied-math methods into production software for DOE user facilities.
- ASCRIBE
- Co-PI of ASCRIBE, an extended-reality scientific visualization project. ASCRIBE-XR brings scientific imagery (meshes, volumes, point clouds) into virtual reality, and the ASCRIBE-Link service streams it to headsets live from running experiments.
- ALS BEAMLINE CONTROLS · BCG
- I work with the ALS Beamline Controls Group on the facility-wide move to EPICS, building the software that carries the transition: configuration management (CSM), provisioning automation, and IOC telemetry (IOCular). Lightfall, the next-generation control dashboard, is in commissioning at COSMIC-Scattering.
Software & projects
CSM
Configuration management for beamline control systems. Declarative device configs provision EPICS IOCs across the facility, driving the ALS controls modernization.
IOCULAR
IOC management agent for EPICS control systems: fleet-wide monitoring, remote control, log streaming, and deployment.
GPCAM
Autonomous experimentation and uncertainty quantification engine from CAMERA. Gaussian processes decide where to measure next.
TSUCHINOKO
Desktop Qt application that runs gpCAM adaptive experiments at the beamline.
XI-CAM
Extensible platform for synchrotron data reduction, visualization, and management.
ASCRIBE-XR
Scientific data visualization in VR (Godot 4 + OpenXR), with an HTTP specimen server for meshes, volumes, and point clouds.
BCSOPHYD-ZMQ
LabVIEW ↔ Bluesky bridge over ZMQ for legacy beamline control integration.
Publications & talks
Selected. Full list on Google Scholar.
- 2026 Lightfall: An API-first, LLM-addressable control platform for synchrotron beamlines. Pandolfi, Guenzing, Noack, Morley, English. arXiv:2606.06711.
- 2025 ASCRIBE-XR: Extended Reality for Visualization of Scientific Images. Pandolfi, Todd, Donatelli, Ushizima. Proc. SC'25 Workshops, presented at SC'25. DOI:10.1145/3731599.3767368.
- 2025 gp2Scale: Compactly-supported non-stationary kernels and distributed computing for exact Gaussian processes on 10 million data points. Noack, Risser, Luo, Tekriwal, Pandolfi. arXiv:2512.06143.
- 2025 INVITED Tsuchinoko: a GUI for Autonomous Experiments. Seminar at NSLS-II, Brookhaven National Laboratory, with follow-up online seminar.
- 2018 Xi-cam: a versatile interface for data visualization and analysis. Journal of Synchrotron Radiation (cited 100+).