Title
An Interoperable, Data-Structure-Neutral Component for Mesh Query and Manipulation
Abstract
Much of the effort required to create a new simulation code goes into developing infrastructure for mesh data manipulation, adaptive refinement, design optimization, and so forth. This infrastructure is an obvious target for code reuse, except that implementations of these functionalities are typically tied to specific data structures. In this article, we describe a software component---an abstract data model and programming interface---designed to provide low-level mesh query and manipulation support for meshing and solution algorithms. The component’s data model provides a data abstraction, completely hiding all details of how mesh data is stored, while its interface defines how applications can interact with that data. Because the component has been carefully designed to be general purpose and efficient, it provides a practical platform for implementing high-level mesh operations independently of the underlying mesh data structures. After describing the data model and interface, we provide several usage examples, each of which has been used successfully with multiple implementations of the interface functionality. The overhead due to accessing mesh data through the interface rather than directly accessing the underlying mesh data is shown to be acceptably small.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1145/1824801.1864430
ACM Trans. Math. Softw.
Keywords
Field
DocType
abstract data model,data structure independence,data abstraction,mesh-based simulations,mesh query,underlying mesh data structure,data model,specific data structure,high-level mesh operation,software components,data-structure-neutral component,mesh data manipulation,accessing mesh data,mesh data,underlying mesh data,mesh modification,data structure,design optimization,interface design,software component,simulation software
Data structure,Interoperability,Computer science,Theoretical computer science,Software,Component-based software engineering,Code reuse,Data manipulation language,Data model,Mesh generation
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
37
3
0098-3500
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
11
0.69
7
Authors
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Carl Ollivier-Gooch18217.29
Lori Freitag Diachin21167.43
Mark S. Shephard347967.67
Timothy Tautges4252.83
Jason Kraftcheck5110.69
Vitus J. Leung6253.47
Xiaojuan Luo7686.91
Mark Miller8110.69