[yt-users] yt Version 1.6 Release Announcement

[Matthew Turk]

We're proud to announce the release of yt version 1.6, a point release
of the analysis and visualization toolkit for Adaptive Mesh Refinement
data. This release contains many small improvements to the codebase,
as well as several large improvements. Most prominently, it features a
completely redesigned, massively parallel implementation of the halo
finding algorithm HOP, as well as attendant improvements to particle
data IO and parallel communication. Additionally, the underlying data
structures for hierarchical datasets have been rewritten for speed and
clarity, enabling the future addition of new multi-resolution data
formats to be easily added.

yt features native support for Enzo
(http://lca.ucsd.edu/projects/enzo) data, providing a natural and
intuitive way to address physical regions in space as well as
processed data.

Some of the changes since yt-1.5 (released on November 3, 2009) include:

 * (New) Parallel HOP ( http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.3411 )
 * (Beta!) Software ray casting and volume rendering (Sam Skillman has
a gallery here:
http://casa.colorado.edu/~skillman/simulation_gallery/simulation_gallery.html
)
 * Rewritten, faster and better contouring engine for clump identification
 * Spectral Energy Distribution calculation for stellar populations
 * Optimized data structures such as the hierarchy
 * Star particle analysis routines
 * Halo mass function routines
 * Completely rewritten, massively faster and more memory efficient Particle IO
 * Fixes for plots, including normalized phase plots
 * Better collective communication in parallel routines
 * Consolidation of optimized C routines into amr_utils
 * Many bug fixes and minor optimizations
 * Installation instructions, documentation, recipes, mailing list
info and assorted other items can be found at the website,
http://yt.enzotools.org/ along with an annotated changelog at
http://yt.enzotools.org/doc/changelog.html .

yt is a Free and Open Source project, and we invite you to get
involved. For more information, join the yt-dev mailing list, or see
the hacking guidelines on the Wiki:
http://yt.enzotools.org/wiki/HackingGuidelines .

Sincerely,

The yt development team:

Matthew Turk
Stephen Skory
Britton Smith
Jeff Oishi
Sam Skillman
Devin Silvia
John Wise
David Collins