[AstroPy] [ANN] Astropy v1.0.4 released!

[Erik Bray]

On 08/11/2015 04:43 PM, Erik Bray wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Astropy v1.0.4 has just been released.  This is a minor bug fix release--you can
> read the full list of fixes in the changelog:
>
> https://github.com/astropy/astropy/blob/v1.0.4/CHANGES.rst#104-2015-08-11
>
> There are a couple changes in particular worth calling out:
>
> - The astropy.convolution routines now release the Python GIL during their
>      main loops.  This allows convolution to be parallelized effectively.  For
>      example an image can be broken into multiple chunks to be convolved in
>      parallel in a multithreaded environment.

Just a quick clarification--this change only affects the 
astropy.convolution.convolve [1] routine, the main loops of which are 
implemented in Cython and now release the GIL.

The convolve_fft [2] routine generally assumes that the FFT implementation in 
use (numpy.fft.fft [3] by default) is compiled from C or FORTRAN and already 
releases the GIL.

Erik


[1] 
http://docs.astropy.org/en/v1.0.4/api/astropy.convolution.convolve.html#astropy.convolution.convolve
[2] 
http://docs.astropy.org/en/v1.0.4/api/astropy.convolution.convolve_fft.html#astropy.convolution.convolve_fft
[3] 
http://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/reference/generated/numpy.fft.fft.html#numpy.fft.fft