Traditional message-passing paradigms typically provide general but low-level inter-process communications, such as send, receive, and broadcast. In physical simulations using finite element or finite volume methods, communications are typically across panes or partitions, whether the panes or partitions are on the same or different processes. The Roccom framework provides high-level inter-pane communication abstractions, including performing reductions (such as sum, max, and min operations) on shared nodes, and updating values for ghost (i.e., locally cached copies of remote values of) nodes or elements. Communication patterns between these nodes and elements are encapsulated in the pane connectivity of a window, which can be provided by application modules or constructed automatically in parallel using geometric algorithms. These inter-pane communication abstractions simplify parallelization of a large number of modules, including surface propagation and mesh smoothing, which we will discuss in the next section.