Hi all, This last weekend, John, Nathan, Britton, Sam and I were fortunate enough to be in the same place for a couple days and we had a sprint on some yt functionality. Almost all of the changes have gone into the code base already, but we wanted to share them with you all. Feel free to chime in with questions, comments, or more information. = Parallelism Improvements = Britton implemented a pure-MPI task queuing system that works with the existing parallel_objects machinery. It is currently not threaded (and opinions vary as to whether that would be productive or not) and so one MPI task is dedicated as the controller node that distributes objects. This can either be manually used or you can simply supply "dynamic=True" to the parallel_objects machinery. I have to say, the changes to yt's parallelism in the last year or so have been pretty much my favorite improvements, and Britton really knocked this one out of the park, in my opinion. As I noted in my other email, with the pull request for Reason, Britton also added an MPI-parallel backend for Reason. I won't repeat my email here, but if you want to test it out you'll need Pyro4 and the launcher script in scripts/ . This will be documented in more detail when I finish up the remaining task, which is to deliver intermediate payloads from the MPI controller back to the web browser. = Plot Window = Perhaps Nathan would be better at describing this, but he's now implemented a mechanism (built on Jeff's initial design) for generating nice plots easily and complex plots straightforwardly. This was discussed here: http://lists.spacepope.org/pipermail/yt-dev-spacepope.org/2012-June/002111.h... Nathan, anything you wanted to add? = Reason = This was described in my other email as well: http://lists.spacepope.org/pipermail/yt-dev-spacepope.org/2012-June/002117.h... and this PR: https://bitbucket.org/yt_analysis/yt/pull-request/179/reason-gui-refactor-ex... If anybody can test this out, I'd appreciate it. I did note this weekend that when running simulations, I spied a few of the other sprinters using it. I think seeing developers using something means it has "arrived." (And I know Sam has a volume rendering widget in mind ...) = Ghost Zones = John spent a good amount of time implementing a fast sibling finder, as well as a ghost zone filling mechanism. This is designed to replace the existing mechanism of a smoothed covering grid, which requires interpolation from the coarsest level up to the requested level. This should lead to a considerable performance increase when doing anything having ghost zones. I think this is going to be PR'd sometime in the next while. -- Anyway, I think I speak for everybody when I say it was a pretty successful sprint, and we'd love to hear your feedback! -Matt