LiberTEM 0.5.0 released

[Dieter Weber]

Dear subscribers,

LiberTEM 0.5.0 is released! It brings a large number of usability and
performance improvements, including progress bars, file type and
parameter auto detection, result download from the GUI, automatic thread
count settings on workers, and fast single-pass standard deviation
calculation.

Full change log: https://libertem.github.io/LiberTEM/changelog.html#v0-5-0

Recent events
-------------

In February, Alex and I visited Christoph Koch's group in Berlin
together with Andreas Mittelberger from Nion for a hackathon to
integrate LiberTEM support in Nion Swift. A prototype can be found here:
<https://github.com/Brow71189/libertem-hackaton> Please let Andreas,
Chris Meyer or us know if this is of interest to you! Many thanks to
Christoph and his group for hosting the event.

Furthermore, we've made progress in designing back-end support for
ptychography within the Ptychography 4.0 project:
<https://github.com/LiberTEM/LiberTEM/issues/651>.

Current and ongoing activities
------------------------------

We had to postpone work on live imaging due to the COVID-19 situation
and have focused on items that are more suitable for remote development.
We'll pick live imaging up again as soon as possible.

In the meantime, Alex rewrote the I/O pipeline of LiberTEM. It will
bring significant performance improvements in a number of important
applications by supplying data to UDFs in optimized chunk sizes and
shapes on-demand. We've seen about 2x improvement in tests, in some
cases even more. This is mostly done and will be merged in the master
branch soon for wider roll-out and testing. Many thanks and
congratulations for this achievement!

GPU support through Cupy is on our short list for the next release, too.

We are continuing with GSoC 2020, which was also the source of many
changes in this release. Many thanks to the many new contributors and to
Alex for taking on most of the mentoring workload!

If you are using LiberTEM, and have feedback for us, don't
hesitate to reach out! Please also let us know if you are missing a
crucial feature which currently prevents you from using LiberTEM.

You can reach us online in the Issue tracker
<https://github.com/LiberTEM/LiberTEM/issues>, Gitter chat
<https://gitter.im/LiberTEM/Lobby> or by e-mail: Alexander Clausen
<a.cl...@fz-juelich.de>, Dieter Weber <d.w...@fz-juelich.de>.

With best regards,
Dieter


--
Dr. Dieter WEBER

Peter Grünberg Institute, Microstructure Research (PGI-5)
Ernst Ruska-Centre for Microscopy and Spectroscopy with Electrons (ER-C)
Forschungszentrum Jülich
52425 Jülich, Germany

Email: d.w...@fz-juelich.de
Phone: +49 2461 61 85118


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Forschungszentrum Juelich GmbH
52425 Juelich
Sitz der Gesellschaft: Juelich
Eingetragen im Handelsregister des Amtsgerichts Dueren Nr. HR B 3498
Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats: MinDir Volker Rieke
Geschaeftsfuehrung: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Wolfgang Marquardt (Vorsitzender),
Karsten Beneke (stellv. Vorsitzender), Prof. Dr.-Ing. Harald Bolt
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