% $Id$
%
% Earth System Modeling Framework
% Copyright (c) 2002-2025, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, 
% Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Geophysical Fluid Dynamics 
% Laboratory, University of Michigan, National Centers for Environmental 
% Prediction, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, 
% NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
% Licensed under the University of Illinois-NCSA License.

\label{sec:RHandle}

The ESMF RouteHandle class provides a unified interface for all route-based communication methods across the Field, FieldBundle, Array, and ArrayBundle classes. All route-based communication methods implement a pre-computation step, returning a RouteHandle, an execution step, and a release step. Typically the pre-computation, or Store() step will be a lot more expensive (both in memory and time) than the execution step. The idea is that once precomputed, a RouteHandle will be executed many times over during a model run, making the execution time a very performance critical piece of code. In ESMF, Regridding, Redisting, and Haloing are implemented as route-based communication methods. The following sections discuss the RouteHandle concepts that apply uniformly to all route-based communication methods, across all of the above mentioned classes.





