The Cinema toolkit has been developed by Los Alamos National Laboratory, as part of the Cinema Project.
Cinema is an innovative way of capturing, storing and exploring extreme scale scientific data. It is a highly interactive image-based approach to data analysis and exploration that promotes investigation of large scientific datasets, and is easily integrated into your existing workflows through extensions to widely used open source tools. This novel approach supports interactive exploration of a wide range of results, while still significantly reducing data movement and storage.
Extreme scale scientific simulations are leading a charge to exascale computation, and data analytics runs the risk of being a bottleneck to scientific discovery. Due to power and I/O constraints, we expect in situ visualization and analysis will be a critical component of these workflows. Options for extreme scale data analysis are often presented as a stark contrast: write large files to disk for interactive, exploratory analysis, or perform in situ analysis to save detailed data about phenomena that a scientists knows about in advance. With Cinema, we have developed a novel framework for a third option – a highly interactive, compact and scalable way to explore data.
The Cinema toolkit is a collection of viewers, components, exporters and algorithms that operate on cinema databases.
The Current Data Specification describes the Cinema database data format, which can be easily written and read applications, tools and scripts.