Hi all, I'm writing today about a change in the way yt is being developed, which may have some visible changes. I want to start out by emphasizing that yt is, and will increasingly *be*, a *community* project driven by pragmatic needs for scientific analysis. Below I've outlined a couple of my future projects as well as a brief discussion of how to ensure that yt retains the community-developed approach that has served it very well over the last few years. As of January 1st, I've begun an NSF postdoctoral fellowship (the Office of CyberInfrastructure's "Transformative Computational Science" fellowship) designed to develop yt to the point that it can be used as a full integrated science environment, starting with the generation of initial conditions, moving through the conducting of a simulation, continuing with analysis (both post-processing and during the course of the calculation) and finishing with both scientific and outreach quality visualization. This will be driven forward most directly by my own studies of the formation of the first stars and galaxies, but it will also be conducted completely in the open and will be designed to provide a new mechanism for conducting simulations for the computational astrophysics community as a whole. These changes will be developed to be applicable to many different astrophysics codes, not just Enzo. My absence the last few weeks has been a result of this; I packed up and moved from San Diego to New York City and Columbia University. However, I need to emphasize that this won't just be me working in isolation for a few months and tossing things back at the source control repository: this project will live or die based on how well it is integrated into the workflows of others, and based on how engaged the other users and developers of yt are in the process of making these changes. If conducted in isolation, this project surely would fail; if conducted without the feedback from other working scientists, this project won't ever gain traction. This means that through the process of making decisions about the design and implementation of components up to and including initial deployment, I will be soliciting feedback, encouraging interaction and testing changes. As users and developers, you are free to be as involved with or as removed from this process as you desire. This new fellowship will result in several nearly immediate changes: 1) The oft-delayed 2.0 release: I will be putting out a 2.0 release, with the attendant documentation, by the 14th of January. This will mean the re-organized codebase will be the "stable" branch, and the cookbook and documentation will be updated to reflect this. 2) Documentation will be prioritized from here on out; I am dedicated to 100% coverage of yt.mods with docstrings, as well as newly written narrative documentation for yt. 3) A new system we're tentatively calling "the Forge" will be deployed to replace the ailing Barn, and I will focus on developing mechanisms for sharing of scripts and analysis tools. 4) Regression and answer testing will be run on a daily or weekly basis, to prevent errors and bitrot from creeping in. This will be initiated sometime in the couple weeks, hardware permitting. There will also be several more medium-term changes. 1) Outreach: yt and the yt community will aim to provide a bridge between scientists and outreach, by striving to enable both connections between outreach facilitators and by providing intuitive, narrative methods for visualization of astrophysical data. I am going to try to "bake in" narrative techniques into the visualization tools provided by yt. 2) The de-enzo-fication of yt will continue. Assumptions about the nomenclature, the data types and the content of data will be eliminated, and yt will continue to provide physically-motivated astrophysical analysis that abstracts the underlying data objects. 3) Blogging: I will strive to blog once a week on my progress toward these goals, on the Enzotools blog at blog.enzotools.org. As work progresses on the formal goals of the fellowship, I will update the mailing list, although I will attempt to keep the number of updates to a minimum on yt-users and keep both yt-dev and the Enzotools Blog as the main grounds for discussion. Thanks to all the other developers -- even though I wrote yt initially, it's a *community* project, and I do not see a future for it except as a community project. Best wishes, Matt
participants (1)
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Matthew Turk