Turk’s yt project receives NSF grant to expand to multiple science domains

Matthew Turk
Matthew Turk, Assistant Professor

The yt project, an open science environment created to address astrophysical questions through analysis and visualization, has been awarded a $1.6 million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to continue developing their software project. This grant will enable yt to expand and begin to support other domains beyond astrophysics, including weather, geophysics and seismology, molecular dynamics, and observational astronomy. It will also support the development of curricula for Data Carpentry, to ease the onramp for scientists new to data from these domains.

iSchool Assistant Professor Matthew Turk is leading the project with Nathan Goldbaum, Kacper Kowalik, and Meagan Lang of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and in collaboration with Ben Holtzman at Columbia University in the City of New York and Leigh Orf at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

yt is an open source, community-driven project working to produce an integrated science environment for collaboratively asking and answering questions about simulations of astrophysical phenomena, leading to the application of analysis and visualizations to many different problems within the field. It is built in an ecosystem of packages from the scientific software community and is committed to open science principles and emphasizes a helpful community of users and developers. Many theoretical astrophysics researchers use yt as a key component of all stages of their computational workflow, from debugging to data exploration, to the preparation of results for publication.

yt has been used for projects within astrophysics as diverse as studying mass-accretion onto the first stars in the Universe, the outflows from compact objects and supernovae, and the star formation history of galaxies. It has been used to analyze and visualize some of the largest simulations ever conducted, and visualizations generated by yt have been featured in planetarium shows such as Solar Superstorms, created by the Advanced Visualization Lab at NCSA.

"I'm delighted and honored by this grant, and we hope it will enable us to build, sustain, and grow the thriving open science community around yt, and share the increase in productivity and discovery made possible by yt in astrophysics with researchers across the physical sciences," said Principal Investigator Matthew Turk.

Tags:
Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

Knox appointed interim dean

Professor Emily Knox has been appointed to serve as interim dean of the School of Information Sciences, pending approval by the Board of Trustees. Until officially approved, her title will be interim dean designate. The appointment will begin April 1, 2025.

Emily Knox

iSchool instructors ranked as excellent

Fifty-six iSchool instructors were named in the University's List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent for Fall 2024 and Winter 2024-2025. The rankings are released every semester, and results are based on the ratings from the Instructor and Course Evaluation System (ICES) questionnaire forms maintained by Measurement and Evaluation in the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning. 

iSchool Building

Ocepek and Sanfilippo co-edit book on misinformation

Assistant Professor Melissa Ocepek and Assistant Professor Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo have co-edited a new book, Governing Misinformation in Everyday Knowledge Commons, which was recently published by Cambridge University Press. An open access edition of the book is available, thanks to support from the Governing Knowledge Commons Research Coordination Network (NSF 2017495). The new book explores the socio-technical realities of misinformation in a variety of online and offline everyday environments. 

Governing Misinformation in Everyday Knowledge Commons book

Faculty receive support for AI-related projects from new pilot program

Associate Professor Yun Huang, Assistant Professor Jiaqi Ma, and Assistant Professor Haohan Wang have received computing resources from the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR), a two-year pilot program led by the National Science Foundation in partnership with other federal agencies and nongovernmental partners. The goal of the pilot is to support AI-related research with particular emphasis on societal challenges. Last month, awardees presented their research at the NAIRR Pilot Annual Meeting.

iSchool participation in iConference 2025

The following iSchool faculty and students will participate in iConference 2025, which will be held virtually from March 11-14 and physically from March 18-22 in Bloomington, Indiana. The theme of this year's conference is "Living in an AI-gorithmic world."