The seed cell method [5] extracts each contour (manifold) by local propogation from a seed cell. However, for an extremely large data set this local propogation can incur much disk seek time.
Since the active cells for any isosurface component are contained in a single zone component file, we propose to do the following. If the zone component is small enough, we read this single file containing a superset of the active cells into memory (it should be contained in one extent on disk) reducing seek time to O(1). If the zone component is too large, we can further organize it into an I/O optimal interval tree [23] to read the active cells from the file. We believe this will result in minimal I/O time over all known methods for isosurface extraction.