Data Parallel Hypersweeps for in Situ Topological Analysis

The contour tree is a tool for understanding the topological structure of a scalar field. Recent work has built efficient contour tree algorithms for shared memory parallel computation, driven by the need to analyze large data sets in situ while the simulation is running. Unfortunately, methods for using the contour tree for practical data analysis are still primarily serial, including single isocontour extraction, branch decomposition and simplification. We report data parallel methods for these tasks using a data structure called the hyperstructure and a general purpose approach called a hypersweep. We implement and integrate these methods with a Cinema database that stores features as depth images and with a web server that reconstructs the features for direct visualization.