[yt-dev] HiPACC yt workshop wrapup

[Matthew Turk]

Hi all,

I'm writing with a quick wrapup of the yt workshop we had at UCSC this
week, sponsored by UC-HiPACC.

All in all, I am extremely pleased with everything that got done.
Over the few days, we had a huge number of improvements all over the
code base, and I was absolutely delighted by the new contributors and
the new improvements.  A few highlights:

 * SPH frontends (Gabriel Altay and Ben Keller) have been vastly
improved, including ionization fields and a new system for
autodetecting Tipsy frontends (load() now works!) along with
domain/endianness detection.
 * The GPU volume rendering interface (Alex Bogert, John Holdener and
Nick Smith) has been well-defined, and will be interoperable with the
yt software renderer.
 * Halo Finder / Analysis (Hilary Egan, Brian Crosby) has been
streamlined, the mass function code cleaned up, and the FOF+Rockstar
code has been implemented more formally
 * The NMSU-ART frontend has been cleaned up, double-checked, and
particle-type-enabled.  (Kenza Arraki)  Also, new answer tests!
 * Software VR has been ripped out and started to be reconstructed
(Sam Skillman) with an eye to clarity and simplicity in the interface.
 * Docs and polish (Nathan Goldbaum) have been worked on a
considerable amount -- in fact, the docs now build again for 3.0, and
we're getting awfully close to a full set of them that cover the new
functionality.
 * IRATE halo catalogs can now be loaded in and examined (Miguel
Rocha), thus furthering the ability of yt to read, write, and analyze
halo catalogs as first class datasets.
 * A new binding-energy check has been started (Andy Elvin)
 * Boxlib 2D polar has been enabled (Elizabeth Lovegrove)

Anyway, it was really fun, productive -- and in many cases,
documented!  With the docs now building on a regular basis, we'll
continue to check things in and update the documentation as new
features are added and existing features are polished.  Thanks again
to Ji-hoon, Miguel, and Nathan for their organization, and thanks to
Joel Primack, Sue Grasso and all of UC-HiPACC for their support of the
workshop as a whole.

-Matt