About yt

What is yt?

yt is a toolkit for analyzing and visualizing quantitative data. Originally written to analyze 3D grid-based astrophysical simulation data, it has grown to handle any kind of data represented in a 2D or 3D volume. yt is an Python-based open source project and is open for anyone to use or contribute code. The entire source code and history is available to all at https://github.com/yt-project/yt .

Who is yt?

As an open-source project, yt has a large number of user-developers. In September of 2014, the yt developer community collectively decided to endow the title of member on individuals who had contributed in a significant way to the project. For a list of those members and a description of their contributions to the code, see our members website.

History of yt

yt was originally created to study datasets generated by cosmological simulations of galaxy and star formation conducted by the simulation code Enzo. After expanding to address data output by other simulation platforms, it further broadened to include alternate, grid-free methods of simulating – particularly, particles and unstructured meshes.

With the release of yt 4.0, we are proud that the community has continued to expand, that yt continues to participate in the broader ecosystem, and that the development process is continuing to improve in both inclusivity and openness.

For a more personal retrospective by the original author, Matthew Turk, you can see this blog post from 2017.

How do I contact yt?

If you have any questions about the code, please contact the yt users email list. If you’re having other problems, please follow the steps in What to do if you run into problems, particularly including Slack and GitHub issues.

How do I cite yt?

If you use yt in a publication, we’d very much appreciate a citation! You should feel free to cite the ApJS paper with the following BibTeX entry:

@ARTICLE{2011ApJS..192....9T,
   author = {{Turk}, M.~J. and {Smith}, B.~D. and {Oishi}, J.~S. and {Skory}, S. and
     {Skillman}, S.~W. and {Abel}, T. and {Norman}, M.~L.},
    title = "{yt: A Multi-code Analysis Toolkit for Astrophysical Simulation Data}",
  journal = {The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series},
archivePrefix = "arXiv",
   eprint = {1011.3514},
 primaryClass = "astro-ph.IM",
 keywords = {cosmology: theory, methods: data analysis, methods: numerical },
     year = 2011,
    month = jan,
   volume = 192,
      eid = {9},
    pages = {9},
      doi = {10.1088/0067-0049/192/1/9},
   adsurl = {https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2011ApJS..192....9T},
  adsnote = {Provided by the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System}
}

While this paper is somewhat out of date – and certainly does not include the appropriate list of authors – we are preparing a new method paper as well as preparing a new strategy for ensuring equal credit distribution for contributors. Some of this work can be found at the yt-4.0-paper repository.