Welcome to DAWN

 

Introduction


DAWN is a scientific data analysis, processing and visualisation package primarily written by Diamond Light Source. These pages serve as the online manual for DAWN and are supplemented by a number of videos which can be found on the DAWNScience YouTube channel. As ever, both the written manual and online videos are a work in progress and any questions not answered here, or any suggestions you may have, can be addressed to: scientificsoftware@diamond.ac.uk


DAWN has a presence on:

 

This page has been broken down into three sections:

Getting Started

 

This section is split into a number of parts depending on how you're anticipating to use DAWN, please select the most relevant option to you:

From a Diamond computer

During your time at Diamond DAWN is available on all Linux workstations and does not need to be installed. Depending on the workstation you are using it should either be available via the Diamond Launcher or the Linux Terminal, please see below for more information.

Using the Diamond Launcher

In the top right hand of any Red Hat Linux (RHEL) workstation at Diamond there should be a greyscale Diamond logo, clicking on this should reveal a number of options at least one of which should be DAWN. It is possible that there could be several entries for DAWN in the Diamond launcher, the naming convention is that the number and letter following the DAWN name corresponds to the maximum amount of RAM that DAWN will be able to use, by default DAWN is allocated a maximum of 1 GB of RAM to use.

As can be seem in the screenshot above, the entry simply called Dawn will load up DAWN with access up to 1 GB of RAM the entry called Dawn4G will load up DAWN with access up to 4 GB of RAM.

From the Terminal

Right clicking on the desktop or from within in a file browser window should bring up the contextual menu seen below

from here select the Open Terminal option to open a new Terminal window. Once within the Terminal enter the text module load dawn followed by pressing the return key and subsequently dawn at the next command prompt to load DAWN. An example of the output to expect within the Terminal window can be seen below.

[username@workstation ~]$ module load dawn Loading 64-bit Anaconda Python, version 2.7 If there are any problems, please contact scientificsoftware@diamond.ac.uk Need a 3rd party Python package installing? First, consider using the user-based install option of pip to test it. (I.e., use $ pip install --user ... For further details, see $ pip help install) This will install the package in ~/.local If a site-wide installation is required, contact Scientific Software. For further details, see $ pip help install ****************************************************************************** Python 2.7 support officially ended on 1st January, 2020 This environment is OBSOLETE so use the python/3 module instead The default conda environment will switch to python/3.7 on 21st December, 2020 ****************************************************************************** ***************************************************************** ** DAWN (Data Analysis WorkbeNch) module loaded ** ***************************************************************** To start the application, type "dawn &". For further options, type "dawn --help" To use Python within DAWN on the Python or PyDev perspectives, click on Window on the menu bar then select Preferences > PyDev > Interpreters > Python and configure a new one using "Config first in PATH". IMPORTANT ========= Please note from November 2019, the pre-loaded python has changed so if you use Python within DAWN then remove any old interpreter configuration from Window > Preferences > PyDev > Interpreters > Python and configure a new one as above. To use Python 3.7 within DAWN, in a new terminal, type $ module load dawn/stable-py3.7 and configure a Python interpreter as above. ***************************************************************** If there are any problems, please contact scientificsoftware@diamond.ac.uk (python2.7) [username@workstation ~]$ dawn

In similar logic to loading DAWN via the Diamond launcher entering in dawn2G, dawn4G, dawn8G, dawn16G or dawn32G,  will load DAWN with access up to n GB of RAM.

From your own computer

Up to 40 days after your Diamond visit has concluded your data will be kept on disk, as per the Diamond Experimental Data Management Policy. During this time you have the choice to interact with your data on our systems directly using our remote access mechanisms or on your own computer. If you haven't already obtained a copy of your data during your visit instructions on how to obtain your data can be found here.

40 days after your Diamond visit has concluded your data will be transferred to our tape archive and will need to be retrieved using our TopCAT system before it can be downloaded, instructions for this process can be found here.

Once you have retrieved a copy of your data on to your local machine or if you are using data obtained from another facility or source then please see the relevant installation instructions for DAWN from the options below.

Windows

DAWN is principally supported for Windows version 10 & 7, it should work with Windows 8 but limited testing is performed on this version of Windows.

You can download a copy of DAWN from http://dawnsci.org/downloads/. In addition to the current release of DAWN on this page there is also a link to previous versions, should you require or prefer to use an older version. By default, clicking the download button this page will download an executable installer for Windows, as highlighted below, which can be installed in the usual Windows manner. Please note: the images below were not captured for the latest release of DAWN, despite this, the installation methodology remains the same with only the name of the archive changing.

However, if administrator rights on the desired machine are not held, DAWN can also be downloaded as a self-contained zip file from the same page. Once downloaded it can be expanded and run as a typical Windows application, as highlighted below.

Mac

DAWN is principally supported for macOS versions 10.8 to 10.15, it function using macOS Big Sur / macOS 11.0, however, many user interface oddities and mis-drawing events have been observed.

You can download a copy of DAWN from http://dawnsci.org/downloads/. In addition to the current release of DAWN on this page there is also a link to previous versions, should you require or prefer to use an older version. By default, clicking the download button this page will download a disk image file for Macintosh, as highlighted below, which can be installed by the typical dragging-and-dropping methodology. Please note: the images below were not captured for the latest release of DAWN, despite this, the installation methodology remains the same with only the name of the archive changing.

Linux

DAWN is principally supported for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (RHEL 7) environments, however, it is anticipated that it should run on a number of other Linux distributions.

You can download a copy of DAWN from http://dawnsci.org/downloads/. In addition to the current release of DAWN on this page there is also a link to previous versions, should you require or prefer to use an older version. By default, clicking the download button this page will download a zip archive, as highlighted below, which can be executed in the usual RHEL manner. Please note: the images below were not captured for the latest release of DAWN, despite this, the installation methodology remains the same with only the name of the archive changing.

By default DAWN is configured to use, at most, 1 gigabyte of memory. Should you wish to increase this for a single run you will need to launch DAWN from the command line using the following:

[username@workstation ~]$ dawn -vmargs -Xmx4096m

Where 4096m is the number of megabytes of memory that DAWN can access, in this case 4 GB. Should you wish to change the amount of memory that DAWN uses for all subsequent launches you will need to edit the dawn.ini file in the DAWN directory. Similarly to running from the command line, the line you will need to edit the line containing the arguement -Xmx????m, where you replace the ?'s with the number of megabytes of memory you wish DAWN to be able to access.

 

Next Steps

Now that you've managed get DAWN running on the machine you're using please feel free to have a look through some of the pages listed below: