DAWN Science

DAWN, Data Analysis Workbench, (www.dawnsci.org) is a RCP-based application used in Synchrotrons, Neutron Sources and Universities for visualizing and slicing data and running analysis software. DAWN is primarily developed at the Diamond Light Source (www.diamond.ac.uk) however developers and collaborators from around the world are active with the codebase which is open source and available on github. Most of the users of DAWN either download the binary or have a version installed at their institution.

DAWN's visual tools are contributed from extension points and there are a large number of different options available to users when visualizing data. From slicing of multidimensional data to integration, selection regions to 1D mathematics or custom specific scientific tools; DAWN is a powerful tool.

Software to analyse data is available in three forms within DAWN. Java-based algorithms configured by a user interface inside DAWN, third party codes run on a compute cluster of various kinds and finally python scripts developed directly inside DAWN, using Pydev (www.pydev.org). DAWN provides a rich CPython API for use inside the product, so for instance plotting and file readers are accessible for scripting.

The team tries to make DAWN as generic and reusable as possible. DAWN is repackaged and released in three other products with others evaluating. There are some videos of DAWN at different points of development at www.opengda.org/dawnsci/videos.

DAWNSci and the Eclipse Science Working Group

Diamond Light Source have been involved with forming the Eclipse Science Working Group and are committed to working with the community to make tools modular and reusable between disciplines. It would be great if serendipitous discoveries could be made by applying tools developed for one discipline in another and of course the reduction of effort where existing tools can be reused rather than redeveloped. Working with the Eclipse Foundation and members of the group, we hope to make available the ‘DAWNSci’ (projects.eclipse.org/proposals/dawnsci) eclipse project first quarter of 2015 on github. We have abstracted much of the DAWN API into interfaces/services for plotting, data, file reading and conversion, slicing and much more. This API we will commit to supporting an implementation, long term and encourage alternative implementations, which will make tools and algorithms reusable.

DAWN Under Development

DAWN is released at every shutdown of the Diamond Synchrotron, about 4 or 5 times per year. The next release, DAWN 1.8, will be in March 2015. In this version we will provide the ‘Processing’ perspective to make a model based execution engine where users can visually build components to complete custom analysis. We would like to use EMF in future for the user interface and the execution engine is based on Ptolemy 2 (ptolemy.eecs.berkeley.edu) developed with help from Isencia Belgium (www.isencia.be). In 1.8, DAWN will be extended to allow all of the user interface to be scripted by CPython. Users will be able to record macros to see the commands which the user interface is generating. Normally the interface will be driving an OSGi service so all the OSGi services will be available to the cpython layer running in Pydev. It is also hoped that, using reflection, we will be able to autocomplete the cpython calling Java objects. Several new scientific tools will be added in 1.8 for specific tasks for example spectroscopy, ptychography, image alignment and circular dichroism.

Fig 1 - New Isosurface feature in development for DAWN, uses JavaFX

Fig 2 - Slicing of 4D data and showing a new macro being recorded

Getting Started with DAWN

You can download a binary of DAWN at www.dawnsci.org or contact the mailing list at DAWNDEV@ JISCMAIL.AC.UK. If you would like to check out a version of DAWN to reuse in your products, as a software developer, then there are guides on the website or simply get in touch by email.