This award supports a three-day workshop at the FLASH center in Chicago on visualization and analysis for astrophysics simulation codes, focused primarily around the yt package. The workshop covers various aspects of yt, including introductory material, advanced usage and mechanisms for community involvement. Expected outcomes of the workshop include instruction on how to speed up analysis and visualization of astrophysical simulations; expansion of the user and developer base of yt, encouraging further development and support of new codes; and nurturing collaborations between computational astrophysicists.
Broader impacts of this workshop include the dissemination of educational curricula related to the commonly-used yt analysis toolkit and a specific activity on public outreach and education through scientific visualization. Extensive curricula and worked examples will be made available online and will provide a resource for new users and early stage researchers to learn how to utilize this package and decrease the time necessary to learn a new system and productively analyze data.
Understanding astrophysical phenomena often requires conducting complex simulations that draw upon many different branches of physics and that generate large amounts of data. To better understand the underlying physical systems, astronomers often will simulate the same phenomena using different methods; comparing the results of these different methods enables astronomers to quantify and reduce uncertainties in how those physical systems behave as well as to predict and put into context outcomes of observations with telescopes. To address the challenges of both making meaningful comparisons between different methods, as well as to avoid becoming bogged down in repeatedly solving the same computational problems in dealing with the large amounts of data produced by simulations, the yt project has been created as a generic astrophysical analysis platform. This enables the usage of commodity routines for performing complex analysis tasks of astrophysical simulation data. This workshop was designed to train younger scientists in how to use yt, so that they can be more efficient at analyzing and understanding the data their simulations produce. It was held at the FLASH center at the University of Chicago. It provided hands-on instruction, numerous in-person interactions, and resulted in the production of a large amount of online training materials that can be reviewed both by attendees and those who were unable to attend.
