[yt-users] The future of yt

[Brian O'Shea]

Hi Matt,

I know this is a couple days late, but I just wanted to respond to say that
it all sounds very sensible, and I am very excited to see what the future of
yt brings!

--Brian

On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 2:08 PM, Matthew Turk <matthewturk at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> _______________________________________________
> yt-users mailing list
> yt-users at lists.spacepope.org
> http://lists.spacepope.org/listinfo.cgi/yt-users-spacepope.org
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.spacepope.org/pipermail/yt-users-spacepope.org/attachments/20110109/4e193bf8/attachment.html>