the yt project's blog
© 2023 yt project blog
Much Ado About Governance
A new post about our project’s governance!
Relicensing yt from GPLv3 to BSD
Our reasoning for switching licenses for the yt-project
The first yt development workshop!
On March 6-8, 2013 we held a yt development workshop at UCSC. Let’s talk about it!
Announcing the 2013 yt development workshop
Announcing the 2013 yt developer workshop!
yt Google+ Hangout tomorrow!
Tomorrow we’re going to try something new – Google Hangouts! If you’d like help with something, to share some feedback, or just to say hi to other community members, stop by Tuesday, May 1st. We’ll be starting up around 2PM Eastern and continuing for a couple hours.
If this works out, we’ll try it again from time to time, to catch up on new developments, help out with scripts or visualization issues, soliciting feedback, and to chat about using and developing yt.
What's new with yt?
Now that the post-workshop preparations and work have settled down, I thought it might be interesting to share some of the developments going on with yt. We’re still a long way from a new release, so these interim ‘development’ updates are meant to be a bit of a teaser. As always, these features are either in the main branch or (if noted) in a public fork on BitBucket. If they sound interesting, drop us a line on `yt-dev <http://lists.
yt workshop 2012 - a success!
The yt workshop last week in Chicago ( http://yt-project.org/workshop2012/ ) was an enormous success. On behalf of the organizing and technical committees, I’d like to specifically thank the FLASH Center, particularly Don Lamb, Mila Kuntu, Carrie Eder, for their hospitality; the venue was outstanding and their hospitality touching. Additionally, we’re very grateful to the Adler Planetarium’s Doug Roberts and Mark SubbaRao for hosting us on Wednesday evening – seeing the planetarium show as well as volume renderings made by yt users up on the dome was so much fun.
Workshop in just a week!
The first yt workshop is in just about a week. We’ve updated the website with the current list of talks, along with information about getting to and from the workshop from the conference hotel, and information about how to get the sample data. Keep your eyes on the website in the lead up to the workshop, as we’ll be posting a script for fisheye lens renderings for our viz night at the Adler, information about the talks and example scripts, and other useful info.
yt workshop registration is open!
Registration for the 2012 yt workshop, to be held at the FLASH center in Chicago from January 24-26, is now open.
Please register here: http://yt- project.org/workshop2012/
Google+ Page for yt
yt now has a Google Plus page. Here’s we’ll post smaller, less blog-worthy items, hold video conferencing ‘hangouts’, and so on. Encircle away! And if you post something you’d like to be reshared, just be sure to explicitly share it with ‘+yt’ so we know.
Announcing the 2012 yt Workshop
I’m pleased to announce the 2012 yt Workshop at the FLASH Center in Chicago, January 24-26.
The workshop will be aimed at both users and developers of yt. We will begin with intensive user training, moving from basic usage to advanced and parallel usage. Users are encouraged to bring their ideas and prototypes for new analysis routines as there will be opportunities to work with more experienced developers. We will then address to how to modify, extend and contribute to yt, and transition to a developers workshop.
New Screencasts
A few of the yt developers have been experimenting with screencasts to show off new features or demonstrate how to do some things. Sam and I have both prepared screencasts on volume rendering and getting started with developing, respectively. Check them out below, and please feel free to leave comments and let us know what you think – not just about the screencasts, but about what they demonstrate, and if you think any of the concepts or routines could be made easier.
This blog has moved -- but you don't have to!
In keeping with the project rename we’ve moved this blog from it’s old home at blog.enzotools.org to its new home at blog.yt-project.org. But, we’ve put in a few redirects, and the RSS feed hasn’t moved, so you shouldn’t need to do anything different to get here. We’ve also enabled anonymous commenting, so feel free to comment below. (But, of course, letting us know who you are would certainly help with keeping in touch!
We're now the yt Project!
This is just a brief blog entry – other news is on the way soon! – to let everyone know we’ve updated our domains. In keeping with the change in focus of the yt project, expanding to work with multiple codes and take broader views of analysis and visualization, we have moved from enzotools.org to yt-project.org. Some other exciting changes will be coming from this in the future, too!
For more info, see the mailing list announcement.
A mission statement and a new homepage!
In case you haven’t visited our front page lately, the yt homepage has been redesigned! The old homepage was nice and functional, but it tried to cram too much into too small a place. The new homepage focuses on the three main questions people have when they go to the yt page: ‘How do I get it?', ‘How do I use it?', and ‘How do I participate?’
The new page is focused on some concrete examples, some quantitative analysis, and features a heavy dosage of the yt community – in fact, the redesign came about through a conversation in IRC, where a few of the core developers were speculating about how best to convey how to participate and how strong a community yt has.
yt development - Quad trees, Tickets and more
It’s been a while since the last Development post — but in that time, some pretty fun things have been going on. These are some of the smaller things, but there are bigger things in store which I’ll write about next time.
QuadTree Projections For a while, there has been the option to use a QuadTree data structure to conduct projections through a simulation volume. This was accessible through the quad_proj attribute, which respected the same interface as the normal proj interface.
yt Logo Contest, and possibly a free mug!
yt is in need of an awesome new logo, which is why we are announcing the first ever new logo contest! So here’s the deal:
We’ll accept entries for the next two weeks. Let’s arbitrarily say Tuesday, May 10th, at 11:59:59 pm EST. If there is more than one entry, we will put it up for a community vote at that time.
Oh, and the most important part – the winner will get a coffee mug with their new logo front and center!
yt development - Treecodes, GUIs, IRC and more!
It’s been nearly a month since the last yt development post; in that time, there’s been quite a bit of development in a couple different areas. This is culminating in a 2.1 release, for which Sam Skillman is release manager, sometime in the next few days.
Streamlines and Treecode SamS has spent some time over the last month developing two types of streamline code. The first integrates a series of streamlines over a selection of the domain, which can then be visualizing using the mplot3d package.
yt development - External Analysis and Simulation Code Support
This last week was the first full week on BitBucket and so far I think it has been quite successful. The new development process is for most of the core developers to maintain personal forks for experimental changes, or longer term changes, and then to commit directly or merge when bug fixes or features are ready to be integrated. The list of forks is easily visible and each individual fork’s divergence from the primary repository can be viewed by clicking on the green arrows.
yt development - BitBucket, Task Queues, and Streamlines
The major changes this week came mostly in the form of administrative shifts. However, SamS did some great work I’m going to hint at (he’ll post a blog entry later) and I started laying the ground work for something I’ve been excited about for a while, an MPI-aware task queue.
BitBucket For the last couple months, yt has been struggling under the constraints of the hg server on its hosting plan.
yt development - Documentation
As a result of progress in my scientific goals, and the application of recent yt developments to them, I did not make many changes or developments in yt this week. When I did work on yt, I primarily spent time re-organizing the documentation and fixing several errors. I have added an “installation” section, consolidated a few sections, and wrote two new sections on how to make plots and on how to generate derived data products.
yt development - star particle rendering, simple merger trees and documentation
This is the first of a new series of “what’s up with yt” blog posts I’m going to be writing. By keeping this log, I hope that maybe some things that would otherwise get lost in the version control changesets will get brought to greater light. This covers the time period of the first couple weeks in January.
Star Particle Rendering On the mailing list, the question of adding star particles to a volume rendering was raised.
yt has moved to mercurial!
For about a year and a half now, most of the unstable development of yt has occurred inside a mercurial repo. Mercurial is a distributed version control system, not unlike git or bzr, where each checkout brings with it the entire history of the repository and enables full development. Each individual can commit changes to their own repository, while still accepting changes from others. It also makes it much easier to submit patches upstream.
Aboout the yt Project
Want to contribute a post? Check out our contributor guide
Check out our documentation here
The yt-project homepage
Our quickstart notebooks on getting started
The yt source repository
yt extension modules
yt has many extension packages to help you in your scientific workflow! Check these out, or create your own.
ytini
ytini is set of tools and tutorials for using yt as a tool inside the 3D visual effects software Houdini or a data pre-processor externally to Houdini.
Trident
Trident is a full-featured tool that projects arbitrary sightlines through astrophysical hydrodynamics simulations for generating mock spectral observations of the IGM and CGM.
pyXSIM
pyXSIM is a Python package for simulating X-ray observations from astrophysical sources.
ytree
Analyze merger tree data from multiple sources. It’s yt for merger trees!
yt_idv
yt_idv is a package for interactive volume rendering with yt! It provides interactive visualization using OpenGL for datasets loaded in yt. It is written to provide both scripting and interactive access.
widgyts
widgyts is a jupyter widgets extension for yt, backed by rust/webassembly to allow for browser-based, interactive exploration of data from yt.
yt_astro_analysis
yt_astro_analysis is the yt extension package for astrophysical analysis.
Make your own!!
Finally, check out our development docs on writing your own yt extensions!
Contributing to the Blog
Are you interested in contributing to the yt blog?
Check out our post on contributing to the blog for a guide!
We welcome contributions from all members of the yt community. Feel free to reach out if you need any help.
the yt data hub
The yt hub at https://girder.hub.yt/ has a ton of resources to check out, whether you have yt installed or not.
The collections host all sorts of data that can be loaded with yt. Some have been used in publications, and others are used as sample frontend data for yt. Maybe there’s data from your simulation software?
The rafts host the yt quickstart notebooks, where you can interact with yt in the browser, without needing to install it locally. Check out some of the other rafts too, like the widgyts release notebooks – a demo of the widgyts yt extension pacakge; or the notebooks from the CCA workshop – a user’s workshop on using yt.