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.

Contributors

Many individuals have contributed to yt over its existence. We're fortunate to have a community of individuals using, developing, and sharing information about yt. For a more detailed breakdown of contribution information and statistics, check out our Open HUB Page. and our Members Page.

What has yt been used for?

Analysis and visualization using yt has been applied to many different problems within Astrophysics. For a few places yt has been applied, see the list of citations to the yt method paper.

A few of the more fun things yt has been used for include the cover of the July 25, 2013 issue of Nature (and the accompanying ALMA press release), a visualization in the Adler Planetarium gallery "A Walk Through Space and Time" (a version of which won the XSEDE13 "Best Visualization"), and as a visualization component in the Seismic Sound Lab at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

A few talks about yt can be found online, including at SciPy 2014 by Nathan Goldbaum about yt-3.0 and at SciPy 2013 by Sam Skillman describing how volume rendering was developed by and for our community. At SciPy 2012, Matthew Turk gave an overview of yt and its goals. And, the entire workshop from January 2012 hosted at the FLASH center is available for viewing.

A Scientific Ecosystem

yt is built in an ecosystem of packages from the scientific software community. These includes libraries that have been created, developed and maintained by hundreds of individuals from different backgrounds.

yt is written in Python, which provides rapid development, scripting capabilities, and a huge number of packages.

Where speed is a concern, or C-interoperability is necessary, we utilize Cython as a mechanism for creating extensions.

NumPy is an essential mechanism for fast array computations in Python.

IPython is a rich environment for interactive computation.

Matplotlib is a 2D plotting library for Python for publication-quality plots and data visualizations.

yt Community Code of Conduct

The community of participants in open source Scientific projects is made up of members from around the globe with a diverse set of skills, personalities, and experiences. It is through these differences that our community experiences success and continued growth. We expect everyone in our community to follow these guidelines when interacting with others both inside and outside of our community. Our goal is to keep ours a positive, inclusive, successful, and growing community.

As members of the community,

• We pledge to treat all people with respect and provide a harassment- and bullying-free environment, regardless of sex, sexual orientation and/or gender identity, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, nationality, ethnicity, and religion. In particular, sexual language and imagery, sexist, racist, or otherwise exclusionary jokes are not appropriate.
• We pledge to respect the work of others by recognizing acknowledgment/citation requests of original authors. As authors, we pledge to be explicit about how we want our own work to be cited or acknowledged.
• We pledge to welcome those interested in joining the community, and realize that including people with a variety of opinions and backgrounds will only serve to enrich our community. In particular, discussions relating to pros/cons of various technologies, programming languages, and so on are welcome, but these should be done with respect, taking proactive measure to ensure that all participants are heard and feel confident that they can freely express their opinions.
• We pledge to welcome questions and answer them respectfully, paying particular attention to those new to the community. We pledge to provide respectful criticisms and feedback in forums, especially in discussion threads resulting from code contributions.
• We pledge to be conscientious of the perceptions of the wider community and to respond to criticism respectfully. We will strive to model behaviors that encourage productive debate and disagreement, both within our community and where we are criticized. We will treat those outside our community with the same respect as people within our community.
• We pledge to help the entire community follow the code of conduct, and to not remain silent when we see violations of the code of conduct. We will take action when members of our community violate this code such as contacting confidential@yt-project.org (all emails sent to this address will be treated with the strictest confidence) or talking privately with the person.

This code of conduct applies to all community situations online and offline, including mailing lists, forums, social media, conferences, meetings, associated social events, and one-to-one interactions.

The yt Community Code of Conduct was adapted from the Astropy Community Code of Conduct, which was partially inspired by the PSF code of conduct.