[yt-dev] Speeding up isocontour flux extraction

[Nathan Goldbaum]

Hi all,

I'm curious if there might be a way to speed up isocontour flux
extraction for my dataset.

Profiling my isocontour extraction script, it seems about 2/3 of the
time is spent generating ghost zones, with the rest in
march_cubes_grid_flux.

This dataset might be suboptimal for this sort of thing as there is a
large number of relatively small grids, so any operation that loops
over grids or generates ghost zones is going to be a bit slow.

Would generating a covering grid and then doing isocontour extraction
on the unigrid dataset be faster?  My dataset is nested AMR and most
of the structure that I'm interested in is near the maximum refinement
level. Perhaps downsampling the data a bit will also help.

Is there anything else I might try to speed things up?

Thanks for any advice you might have,

-Nathan