ALS-RFI-2025.docx

REQUEST FOR INFORMATION – ALS-RFI-2025

REQUEST FOR INFORMATION (RFI) INSTRUCTIONS

Project Magnitude: $1.5M Schedule: RFP issued in Aug 2025 Intent: Information Gathering

Please review all the details provided to ensure you have a complete understanding of this RFI.

This is a Request for Information (RFI) announcement only. This is not a solicitation of proposals and no subcontract will be awarded from this Request. No reimbursement will be made for any costs associated with providing information in response to this Request or any follow-up information requests related to this RFI. No telephone calls will be accepted requesting a bid package or solicitation because there is no bid package or solicitation available. In order to protect the procurement integrity of any future procurement, if any, that may arise from this Request, information regarding the technical point of contact will not be given and no appointments for presentations will be made.

Responding to this RFI does not provide any advantage or disadvantage to potential offerors if LBNL chooses to issue a solicitation for the delivery of goods or services regarding the subject matter.

Proprietary Information: Because information received in response to this RFI may be used to structure future programs and may be made available to the public, respondents must NOT include any information in their responses that might be considered business sensitive, proprietary, or otherwise confidential. Responses must be submitted with the understanding that their contents may be publicly disclosed and, in the event of a public disclosure, LBNL will NOT notify respondents or provide any opportunity to revise or redact submitted information

If your company believes it can provide Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (“Berkeley Lab” or “LBNL”) the goods or services described below, we encourage your company to:

· Complete this form electronically as comprehensively as possible ensuring that all details are typed out clearly, and return by 5/15/2025.

Submit this form and any attachments via email to the following address:

djthomas@lbl.gov

The main point of contact for this RFI is:

Dianna Thomas Procurement Specialist Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Djthomas@lbl.gov

OVERVIEW & BACKGROUND

The Advanced Light Source (ALS) is a specialized particle accelerator that generates bright beams of x-ray light for scientific research. The light is directed through about 40 beamlines to numerous experimental endstations, where scientists from around the world (“users”) can conduct research in a wide variety of fields, including materials science, biology, chemistry, physics, and the environmental sciences. ALS has about 2000 users annually accessing the beamlines to perform their experiments.

The ALS User Office facilitates user interactions with ALS resources through a web-based application. This application encompasses a user registration system, a publications database, proposal submission and processing, and an experiment safety and scheduling platform. User data has been maintained in a 4D database for over two decades. The 4D database functions as a web server and provides a web interface for users to register information, create profiles, submit proposals, schedule on-site visits, and complete feedback surveys, while managing all related data within its tables.

With the evolving user office software requirements, data security, scalability, and integrability requirements, there is an immediate need of re-developing a brand new web based application.

Contemporary technologies, modern tech stacks, and web tools offer the capability for developing fast, secure, scalable, and integrable web applications. Advancements in data management techniques enable efficient storage, retrieval, and data management, along with their seamless integration with other reporting applications and data exploration tools. Using the latest technologies and databases also helps in easy debugging and resolving development challenges.

Therefore, the ALS User Office intends to re-develop the user interface by designing and implementing applications that improve user interaction with ALS resources. This will include redesigning and re-developing the centralized user-serving platform, user registration, proposal submission, publications management, as well as implementing reporting and data exploration tools. Secure authentication (using OAuth, SAML, LDAP) and role-based access control will be implemented and integrated. Existing users' data will also be migrated to the Postgres database from the 4D database for high efficiency, scalability and security. This migration will enable the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) APIs to automate some of our workflows and tasks by leveraging AI. Additionally, ALS User Office plans to adopt continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines to deploy software capability more quickly.

SCOPE OF WORK

Goals and Objectives Develop a brand-new web-based Software application from ground up using modern technologies with backend and frontend capabilities.

The objectives of our project are to build the following features and capabilities for ALS User Office software:

1. Develop a centralized user-serving web based platform: Setting up a centralized user-serving platform to streamline user interactions with ALS resources. This platform will enable users to communicate with the ALS compute resources and platform

2. Develop web based workflows for user registration, proposal submission and processing, experiment safety and scheduling. Implement user registration, proposal submission, experiment scheduling, and safety compliance processes, publications management while integrating secure authentication (OAuth, SAML, LDAP) and role-based access control. A flexible approach to integration with external systems will support compliance and security requirements and other evolving requirements of the ALS User Office. A comprehensive proposal management system will be implemented, including multi-stage reviews, automated approvals, and decision tracking. The platform will include automated notifications, flexible survey tools

3. Develop web-based reporting and data exploration tools: Reporting tools will facilitate data access and Department of Energy reporting, while integration with external systems will support compliance and security requirements

4. Security and integrity: The platform will include robust security measures, including data encryption, audit logs, and scalable infrastructure

5. Adopt CI/CD pipelines for software deployment, efficient maintenance and detailed logging to track user activities

Migrate existing data and users to the new software

1. Database migration: Migrate the existing 4D database, which has managed ALS User Office data for over 20 years, to a modern PostgreSQL-based system. This involves redesigning database tables, ensuring seamless data transfer from our existing database.

Database migration

· Database: The 4D database has been used for the last 20+ years to keep the User Office data.

· Data:

· User Office Data consists of numeric and text datasets.

· The user data consists of the user's personal information, institution details, proposal information and the entire proposal lifecycle. Proposal data contains information about the experiments which users perform at ALS beamlines.

· There are forty beamlines at ALS. In the database, Beamlines data containing information about their availability, their shifts scheduled, shifts allocated and number of users on each beamline in a fiscal year, etc is maintained.

· Size of data:

· 4D is set up on MacOS and the size of data is approx. 38 GB.

· Plan:

· The tables will be re-designed and the data from different tables will be migrated to newly designed tables.

· This data will be migrated to the postgreSQL database.

Centralized User Serving platform

· Set up a centralized web based platform to facilitate efficient and organized access to the ALS resources for researchers and users

· Integration with external authentication services to authenticate users (OAuth, SAML, LDAP)

· Profile management:

· Through this platform, users can create and update profiles, submit proposals for beamtime, complete required safety training, and access essential experiment documentation

· Users should be able to see their progress on their profile page. For example, for the registration process, how many steps have they completed and what tasks are still needed, which required training has been completed, etc.. For proposals submission process, what is the proposal status and what proposals are pending or completed

· The portal facilitates all the administrative and safety requirements before users arrive on-site, streamlining the research process

· Role based access:

· Set up role based access and permissions to the platform for account management, user data management, proposal management, reporting, etc. For example, person with staff access should be able to see the list of people who will be on-site or remote for upcoming experiments

· Portal should be able to host or provide redirect links to the compute platforms of ALS facility

User Registration System

· User management

· Role-based access control and role specific permissions (e.g., user, admin, staff)

· Secure authentication and authorization

· User profile management- create, update, review and manage profiles

· User profile will have their personal information, institutional information, their user types or access type, status (active or not), training information, proposal information

· User Registration

· Set up users’ remote and onsite experiment arrangements

· Validate and verify user identity by integrating with other systems

· Track all users, PI’s, Experiment lead, staff, reviewers for their association history

· Set up user surveys and questionnaire

· Set up survey questionnaire to collect user feedback

· Set up flexible templates which can be updated with new questions

· Maintain the survey data - questions, feedback, dates of feedback, responses to issues raised in feedback, survey comments of types such as general comments, facility support, operation equipment, gaining access to work, guest house experience, etc.

Proposal submission and processing system

· User management

· Role-based access control (e.g., Submitter, Reviewer, Approver, Admin)

· Secure authentication and authorization

· User profile management

· Proposal submission

· Structured form for proposal details (title, description, objectives, etc.)

· File attachments (supporting documents, etc.)

· Auto-save drafts before final submission

· Pdf generation of proposals before and after submission

· Submission confirmation and tracking

· Proposal cycle management (draft, submit, in-review, accepted, rejected, etc)

· Proposal review and evaluation

· Multi-stage review workflow (Initial Screening → Feasibility Review, Science Committee Review, PSP Review → Final Approval)

· Assignment of reviewers based on expertise

· Review scoring and feedback mechanism

· Commenting and discussion on proposals

· Emailing reviewers (Auto and manual)

· Set up AI integration for automated reviewer assignment

· Proposal approval and decision making

· Automated routing for approvals

· Decision notifications (Approval, Revision Requests in an allocation cycle)

· Managing proposals over several beamtime allocation cycles

· Reporting

· Set up queries for data access and Department Of Energy (DOE) report generation

· Set up annual reporting for DOE reports

· Integration and security

· Integration with external systems (example, compliance tools)

· Data encryption and role-based access to sensitive information

· Audit logs for tracking user and proposal activities

Enhancements to existing ALS scheduler

· Enhancements to the existing ALS scheduler and add evolving feature requests

· Performance and scalability improvements to allow faster scheduling and fetching events

· API access support to fetch the scheduled experiments

Enhancements to existing ESAF system

· Enhancements to the existing ESAF scheduler and add evolving feature requests such as chat feature to access beam line, experiment information, and report issues in real time

· Set up role based access control. For example, users should be able to enter the safety details and staff should be able to access, approve/deny them and schedule/re-schedule the experiments based on the experiment safety details

· Set up API access support to be able to fetch the ESAF details

Notifications and communications

· Set up automated and manual e-mail and SMS notifications for

· User profile and registration communications

· User proposal updates

· to contact reviewers

· for mass emails

· tracking and addressing user concerns collected from User surveys

· Set up email templates for proposal processing and user profile related communications

· Set up email templates for the ALS Scheduler and ESAF platforms

· Flexible template addition, update and deletion capabilities

Publications

· Set up publication database

· Ability to automatically fetch the ALS publications from the internet based on different keywords and maintain them in a database, associate them with the people and their experiments and the beamlines and techniques used for the experiments

· Allow users to enter publications to the database manually or by providing the DOI which then retrieves the publication metadata via API

· Allow each publication to be categorized by publication type

· Allow for automatic collection of additional publication data (e.g., citation count) via API at regular time intervals

· Set up API support for other ALS groups to fetch the latest publications from the database for display and record purposes

Reporting & Tooling

· Set up queries for data access and DOE report generation for all the above modules

· Set up ability to access and export data for main tables

· Ability to explore database tables w/ no-code UI

· Predefined set of queries against data on web interface

· Set up a web-based interface for

· Visualizing the data from multiple tables on the plots or in a table

· Statistics based on the data pulled out from the database. Some of the examples are- Visualize the number of users every year coming on-site or remote on a bar chart or time-series, time-series plot number of proposals accepted in a cycle in last 5 years, number of publications in from a beamline in last 5 years or so

Security Requirements

· Set up secure authentication and authorization by working collaboratively with Lab’s cybersecurity team

· Set up security and compliance for data protection policies

Deployment and Other Requirements

· Scalable architecture to handle large user volumes

· API support for external applications (e.g. the registration system). Also, to be done in collaboration with cybersecurity team

· Set up logging for each of the above module to log the details of the users accessing platform, submitting proposals, performing experiments

· Set up CI/CD pipeline in a private code repository to ensure the file containing secrets (e.g. passwords, login access to various machines, database credentials), developed code is safe

Software Requirements We are looking for full stack developers who have expertise in building and deploying enterprise scale Rich web applications with security and compliance features.

Candidates should have experience in following technologies-

1. Front end - Javascript, Angular and Vue JS

2. Back end - Python, Django, Flask framework

3. Authentication and authorization - OAuth and Role based access control

4. Database - Postgres

5. Deployment - Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline

Timeline Requirements The Software must be fully operational by the conclusion of the year 2028.

Key Responsibilities

1. Design, develop, and maintain scalable and secure web applications

2. Implement front-end interfaces using JavaScript, Angular, and Vue.js

3. Develop and optimize backend services with Python, Django, and Flask

4. Implement authentication and authorization mechanisms, including OAuth and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

5. Work with PostgreSQL for database design, queries, and optimizations

6. Ensure smooth deployment using CI/CD pipelines and best DevOps practices

7. Write clean, maintainable, and well-documented code

Required Skills & Experience

1. Strong proficiency in JavaScript, Angular, and Vue.js

2. Experience developing backend applications using Python, Django, and Flask

3. Expertise in authentication and authorization frameworks, particularly OAuth and RBAC

4. Proficiency in working with PostgreSQL databases

5. Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines for automated deployment and integration

6. Familiarity with security and compliance best practices in web based enterprise applications

7. Experience with microservices architecture

8. Knowledge of containerization (Docker, Kubernetes)

Company Information Form Section 1 – Company Information

Section 2 – Contact Information

Section 3 – Organization & Management

In 300 words or less (For Each Question in this Section)

Yes No

Small Business 8(a) Small Disadvantaged Business Women-Owned Small Business HUB Zone Veteran-Owned Business Service Disabled Veteran-Owned

< 2 years 2-5 years 5-10 years >10 years

Section 4 – Business Activities

In 300 words or less (For Each Question in this Section)

Yes No If yes, describe these methods and tools.

Click here to enter text.

Section 5 – Technical Ability

In 300 words or less (For Each Question in this Section)

Any other considerations or items LBNL should be aware of?

List any attachments to the RFI including drawings, budgetary quotes, specifications documents, etc. (please do not attach sales literature or white papers unless requested by LBNL):

1. Representations and Certifications

2.

(Add lines as needed)

END RFI DOCUMENT

2/21/2019 1 | Page image1.jpg