A mission statement and a new homepage!
@ Matthew Turk | Wednesday, Jun 29, 2011 | 2 minute read | Update at Wednesday, Jun 29, 2011

In case you haven’t visited our front page lately, the yt homepage has been redesigned! The old homepage was nice and functional, but it tried to cram too much into too small a place. The new homepage focuses on the three main questions people have when they go to the yt page: ‘How do I get it?’, ‘How do I use it?’, and ‘How do I participate?’

The new page is focused on some concrete examples, some quantitative analysis, and features a heavy dosage of the yt community – in fact, the redesign came about through a conversation in IRC, where a few of the core developers were speculating about how best to convey how to participate and how strong a community yt has. The new homepage also features a mission statement. (Discussion of the mission statement.) It’s designed to reflect the goals and ambitions – not where the end of the road is, but which direction it is pointed. To be honest, as the person who initiated that discussion, I was a bit surprised at how far reaching the discussion became. The mission statement we converged on is reproduced here, but over time it might evolve and be refined.

Feel free to stop by the IRC channel or the mailing lists if this piques your interest and you’d like to chat more.

Mission Statement

The yt project aims to produce an integrated science environment for collaboratively asking and answering astrophysical questions. To do so, it will encompass the creation of initial conditions, the execution of simulations, and the detailed exploration and visualization of the resultant data. It will also provide a standard framework based on physical quantities interoperability between codes.

Development of yt is driven by a commitment to Open Science principles as manifested in participatory development, reproducibility, documented and approachable code, a friendly and helpful community of users and developers, and Free and Libre Open Source Software.

yt extension modules

yt has many extension packages to help you in your scientific workflow! Check these out, or create your own.

ytini

ytini is set of tools and tutorials for using yt as a tool inside the 3D visual effects software Houdini or a data pre-processor externally to Houdini.

Trident

Trident is a full-featured tool that projects arbitrary sightlines through astrophysical hydrodynamics simulations for generating mock spectral observations of the IGM and CGM.

pyXSIM

pyXSIM is a Python package for simulating X-ray observations from astrophysical sources.

ytree

Analyze merger tree data from multiple sources. It’s yt for merger trees!

yt_idv

yt_idv is a package for interactive volume rendering with yt! It provides interactive visualization using OpenGL for datasets loaded in yt. It is written to provide both scripting and interactive access.

widgyts

widgyts is a jupyter widgets extension for yt, backed by rust/webassembly to allow for browser-based, interactive exploration of data from yt.

yt_astro_analysis

yt_astro_analysis is the yt extension package for astrophysical analysis.

Make your own!!

Finally, check out our development docs on writing your own yt extensions!

Contributing to the Blog

Are you interested in contributing to the yt blog?

Check out our post on contributing to the blog for a guide!

We welcome contributions from all members of the yt community. Feel free to reach out if you need any help.

the yt data hub

The yt hub at https://girder.hub.yt/ has a ton of resources to check out, whether you have yt installed or not.

The collections host all sorts of data that can be loaded with yt. Some have been used in publications, and others are used as sample frontend data for yt. Maybe there’s data from your simulation software?

The rafts host the yt quickstart notebooks, where you can interact with yt in the browser, without needing to install it locally. Check out some of the other rafts too, like the widgyts release notebooks – a demo of the widgyts yt extension pacakge; or the notebooks from the CCA workshop – a user’s workshop on using yt.

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