During the VTK-m 1.8 and 1.9 development, the filter infrastructure was
overhauled. Part of this created a completely new set of base classes. To
avoid confusion with the original filter base classes and ease transition,
the new filter base classes were named `NewFilter*`. Eventually after all
filters were transitioned, the old filter base classes were deprecated.
With the release of VTK-m 2.0, the old filter base classes are removed. The
"new" filter base classes are no longer new. Thus, they have been renamed
simply `Filter` (and `FilterField`).
Unfortunately, this introduces a backward-incompatible change with the
filters that use ImplicitFunctions. Before, they would get an
ImplicitFunctionHandle. This class is deprecated, and there is no easy
way to get back the actual type of implicit function stored in it.
There was an error that caused deprecation warnings in VTK-m to be
suppressed, which meant that many uses of deprecated features went
unnoticed. This fixes those deprecation warnings.
The majority of the warnings were caused by the use of the deprecated
`Cast`, `CopyTo`, and `ResetTypes` methods of `UnknownArrayHandle` (or
`VariantArrayHandle`). Both `Cast` and `CopyTo` have been subsumed by
`AsArrayHandle` (to make the functionality more clear). `ResetTypes` now
requires a second template argument to define the storage types to try.
Also fixed some issues with `SerializableField` being deprecated.
This class is no longer necessary because `Field` can now be directly
serialized.
The `VariantArrayHandle` will soon be deprecated for its replacement of
`UnknownArrayHandle`. Thus, `Field` and related classes should start
using the new `UnknownArrayHandle`.
This means that the filters in the examples will no longer properly
support the policies handed to them, but that is the direction we are
headed as the policies are now deprecated.
The version of `Filter::Execute` that takes a policy as an argument is now
deprecated. Filters are now able to specify their own fields and types,
which is often why you want to customize the policy for an execution. The
other reason is that you are compiling VTK-m into some other source that
uses a particular types of storage. However, there is now a mechanism in
the CMake configuration to allow you to provide a header that customizes
the "default" types used in filters. This is a much more convenient way to
compile filters for specific types.
One thing that filters were not able to do was to customize what cell sets
they allowed using. This allows filters to self-select what types of cell
sets they support (beyond simply just structured or unstructured). To
support this, the lists `SupportedCellSets`, `SupportedStructuredCellSets`,
and `SupportedUnstructuredCellSets` have been added to `Filter`. When you
apply a policy to a cell set, you now have to also provide the filter.
The `MultiBlock` class has been renamed to `PartitionedDataSet`, and its API
has been refactored to refer to "partitions", rather than "blocks".
Additionally, the `AddBlocks` method has been changed to `AppendPartitions` to
more accurately reflect the operation performed. The associated
`AssignerMultiBlock` class has also been renamed to
`AssignerPartitionedDataSet`.
This change is motivated towards unifying VTK-m's data model with VTK. VTK has
started to move away from `vtkMultiBlockDataSet`, which is a hierarchical tree
of nested datasets, to `vtkPartitionedDataSet`, which is always a flat vector
of datasets used to assist geometry distribution in multi-process environments.
This simplifies traversal during processing and clarifies the intent of the
container: The component datasets are partitions for distribution, not
organizational groupings (e.g. materials).
Ref #405
Adding an example that demonstrates how to write a distributed filter
that customizes the execution for all blocks in a MultiBlock. This is a
reinterpretation of the `reduce/all_to_all` example provided by DIY.