My name is Matthew Turk, and I am the primary author of yt. I designed and implemented it during the course of my graduate studies working with Prof. Tom Abel at Stanford University, under the auspices of the Department of Energy through the SLAC National Accelerator Center and, briefly, at Los Alamos National Lab. It has evolved from a simple data-reader and exporter into what I believe is a fully-featured toolkit for analysis and visualization of adaptive mesh refinement data.
yt was designed to be a completely Free (as in beer and as in freedom – “free and libre” as the saying goes) user-extensible framework for analyzing and visualizing adaptive mesh refinement data, currently working with both Enzo and Orion data. It relies on no proprietary software – although it can be and has been extended to interface with proprietary software and libraries – and has been designed from the ground up to enable users to be as immersed in the data as they desire.
yt is currently being developed by a team consisting of me, Britton Smith, Stephen Skory, David Collins and Jeff Oishi. All development is conducted in the open, accessible at http://yt.enzotools.org/ .
In some sense, yt is also designed to be rather utilitarian. By virtue of the fact that it has been written in an interpreted language, it can be somewhat slower than purely C-based analysis codes, although I believe that to be mitigated by a cleverness of algorithms and a substantially improved development time for the user. Several of the most computatioanlly intensive problems have been written in C, or rely exclusively on C-based numerical libraries.
The primary goal has been, and will continue to be, to present an interface to the user that enables selection and analysis of arbitrary subsets of data.
yt has evolved substantially over the time of its development. Here is a non-comprehensive list of features:
If you use some of the advanced features of yt and would like to cite it in a publication, you should feel free to cite the Proceedings Paper with the following BibTeX entry:
@InProceedings{SciPyProceedings_46,
author = {Matthew Turk},
title = {Analysis and Visualization of Multi-Scale Astrophysical
Simulations Using Python and NumPy},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 7th Python in Science Conference},
pages = {46 - 50},
address = {Pasadena, CA USA},
year = {2008},
editor = {Ga\"el Varoquaux and Travis Vaught and Jarrod Millman},
}