Hi Ashley,
First of all apologies for not seeing this until now. It looks like your message was held because you're not a member of the mailing list and for some reason the list owners didn't get a notification about the held message. I'm cc'ing you directly in the reply along with the list but to ensure that you'll see future messages and that your messages don't get held you should subscribe to the yt-dev list:
https://mail.python.org/mm3/mailman3/lists/yt-dev.python.org/That's great to hear you're interested, I think GSOC will be a good opportunity for the summer between finishing your bachelors and starting your PhD, especially if you're interested in a computational project for your PhD.
We already had one other potential student express interest in that project, which is fine, but if both of you end up wanting to apply for this project then we might want to think about whether we can break up the project into two separate chunks that do not depend on each other.
Here's a list of materials that you might want to familiarize yourself with as background material for the project:
The
project you are interested in will require an understanding of methods
for interpolating data from an N-body simulation onto various grid
types. To understand the motivation and the algorithms you'll be using,
it would be good to get some background on smoothed particle
hydrodynamics (although it seems you already have some background), KDTrees and the k-nearest neighbors problem. Some
materials that might be helpful:
*
If your university library has it, the discussion in "Computer
Simulation using Particles" by Hockney and Eastwood about particle
deposition methods
SPLASH is a piece of Fortran SPH
visualization software. We don't make use of SPLASH ourselves much, but
the paper describing it has some excellent discussion on how to
visualize SPH data in practice.
You've already submitted your first pull request (thanks again!) so the next step is to start writing your proposal. You're still quite early so there is plenty of time for that step. I'd also be happy to review your proposal early to maximize your changes of success.
Hope that helps!
-Nathan