VisIt is a richly featured visualization tool that is used to visualize some of the largest simulations ever run. The scale of these simulations requires that optimizations are incorporated into every operation VisIt performs. But the set of applicable optimizations that VisIt can perform is dependent on the types of operations being done. Complicating the issue, VisIt has a plugin capability that allows new, unforeseen components to be added, making it even harder to determine which optimizations can be applied. We introduce the concept of a contract to the standard data flow network design. This contract enables each component of the data flow network to modify the set of optimizations used. In addition, the contract allows for new components to be accommodated gracefully within VisIt's data flow network system.

The paper presents an algorithm for material interface reconstruction for data sets where fractional material information is given as a percentage for each element of the underlying grid. The reconstruction problem is transformed to a problem that analyzes a dual grid, where each vertex in the dual grid has an associated barycentric coordinate tuple that represents the fraction of each material present. Material boundaries are constructed by analyzing the barycentric coordinate tuples of a tetrahedron in material space and calculating intersections with Voronoi cells that represent the regions where one material dominates. These intersections are used to calculate intersections in the Euclidean coordinates of the tetrahedron. By triangulating these intersection points, one creates the material boundary. The algorithm can treat data sets containing any number of materials. The algorithm can also create nonmanifold boundary surfaces if necessary. By clipping the generated material boundaries against the original cells, one can examine the error in the algorithm. Error analysis shows that the algorithm preserves volume fractions within an error range of 0.5 percent per material.

We present a new algorithm for material boundary interface reconstruction from data sets containing volume fractions. We transform the reconstruction problem to a problem that analyzes the dual data set, where each vertex in the dual mesh has an associated barycentric coordinate tuple that represents the fraction of each material present. After constructing the dual tetrahedral mesh from the original mesh, we construct material boundaries by mapping a tetrahedron into barycentric space and calculating the intersections with Voronoi cells in barycentric space. These intersections are mapped back to the original physical space and triangulated to form the boundary surface approximation. This algorithm can be applied to any grid structure and can treat any number of materials per element/vertex.