[yt-dev] Good news about a yt grant

[Cameron Hummels]

Congratulations to you guys for the award!  A great honor!

Looking forward to making yt more general for a larger audience!

Cameron

On Thu, Aug 10, 2017 at 9:31 AM, Matthew Turk <matthewturk at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi folks,
>
> We (Nathan, Meagan, Kacper and I) wanted to share some good news.
> We've recently received a grant from the NSF SI2 program; NCSA put out
> a press release here:
>
> http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/news/story/the_yt_project_
> awarded_nsf_grant_to_expand_to_multiple_new_science_domains
>
> (This includes a link to the full proposal, which goes into some detail.)
>
> This is a five year grant, supporting part or all of a couple postdocs
> (UIUC, Columbia, Wisconsin), a research scientist, some PI time and a
> graduate student (along with some workshops).  It has a couple areas
> of development that we'll be working on.  The strictly technical ones
> will be related to improving non-spatial indexing, enabling "path"
> queries in a more full way (think advanced streamlines) and an
> all-new, symbolic field system.  In a sense, these are things we're
> already kind of familiar with how to work on -- YTEPs, code reivew,
> documentation, testing, etc.
>
> The part that's going to be harder -- from the social perspective --
> is that we're going to be working harder to make yt an attractive
> analysis and visualization system outside of astronomy, without losing
> its attractiveness *within* astronomy.
>
> This cross-domain effort ties into things like Britton's recent work
> on splitting out yt_astro_analysis, and the idea of compartmentalizing
> things a bit more within the frontends and whatnot.
>
> We've identified an advisory board with folks from geophysics,
> weather, oceanography, nuclear engineering, plasma physics and
> observational astro, and we're going to spin up a couple new mailing
> lists for this purpose:
>
>  * yt-advisory: advisory board discussions
>  * yt-ssi: administrative info for the grant (possibly boring?)
>
> I'm working to get our lists moved to the yt-project.org domain before
> doing this, though.  All of these will be open, although I suspect not
> of broad interest (and thus why we're creating new ones.)  It might
> turn out that domain-specific discussion ends up overwhelming
> discussion on yt-dev or yt-users, in which case we can split it out,
> but for now yt-dev seems like the right place to put that.
>
> Anyhow, the main takeaway I want to give from this is: I'm pretty
> excited, and I am really, really looking forward to the work we're
> going to do with this.  We could not have gotten this far without the
> amazing community that has grown up around yt.  We're going to work on
> this project in an open, collaborative way in keeping with the spirit
> of what we've done with yt already.
>
> In the proposal itself, we detail the ways in which we will follow the
> standard yt community norms (for design, review, upstream, etc) and
> before it was submitted, we discussed it with the yt steering
> committee to make sure that the language we included did not sideline
> or "squeeze out" anyone in the community.  Ensuring that this
> *supports*, rather than *detracts from*, the community is absolutely
> essential to its success, and we will not be doing anything to
> jeopardize that success: this means more effort on yt, but it does not
> mean that yt will suddenly become a "professionalized" project that
> loses sight of how it got here.  And, we would welcome feedback --
> especially if it seems that we're missing the mark.
>
> We're still figuring out how to most effectively do project management
> for it, but it's going to all be above board, and we'd absolutely
> *love* to collaborate with interested folks on it.
>
> More soon!
>
> -Matt & Nathan
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>



-- 
Cameron Hummels
NSF Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Astronomy
California Institute of Technology
http://chummels.org
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