[3dem] Announcing EMAN2/SPARX 2.04

[Steven Ludtke]

We are pleased to announce the release of a new version of EMAN2/SPARX. While this is a minor release, it
incorporates a number of new features that may be of general interest, even for non-EMAN2/SPARX users, so
we're doing a general announcement. 

As usual, EMAN2/SPARX is available for download as both source & binaries for the major platforms:
http://ncmi.bcm.edu/ncmi/software/software_details?selected_software=counter_222

Major new features include:

- New program e2filtertool.py    (http://blake.bcm.edu/emanwiki/EMAN2/Programs/e2filtertool)
  - Permits the user to interactively filter/process 2D & 3D images. User graphically constructs chains of 
    processors/filters and interactively adjust parameters. There are currently 175 image processing algorithms available.

- New program e2evalimage.py     (http://blake.bcm.edu/emanwiki/EMAN2/Programs/e2evalimage)
  - Interactive power spectrum analysis of raw (unboxed) CCD frames and scanned micrographs. 
    Provides a variety of tools for subregion selection and basic CTF analysis. Designed for interactive use on the microscope
    during data collection, or to rapidly screen sets of images for quality. Large sets of frames can be opened all at once
    for efficient evaluation.

Minor updates:
- New processor 'math.simulatectf', which in conjunction with e2filtertool.py can be used to prepare reasonably realistic 
  simulated particle images.
- Improvements for support for icosahedral structures. Better tools now provided for moving between the various symmetry axis conventions.
- e2ctf.py now shows a subset of the particle images associated with each data set
- Color display of Fourier phases has been fixed.
- New program examples/mergeproject.py which will take 2 projects and merge them into a single new project. For large 
  projects with data in multiple groups, permits the groups to be processed independently, then merged together at some point for a large-scale refinement.
- MPI parallelism improvements, including experimental new option for disabling image caching for clusters with distributed filesystems like Lustre.


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Steven Ludtke, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Co-Director National Center For Macromolecular Imaging
Dept of Biochemistry and Mol. Biol.
Baylor College of Medicine
sludtke at bcm.edu
stevel at alumni.caltech.edu