Posts

Showing posts from August, 2012

Function pointers v. virtual methods in HPC

The design pattern 'Adapter' is useful to add a component to an existing architecture without modifying the said architecture. The Ray assembler is built on top of RayPlatform, a distributed compute engine . Ray is an array of plugins implementing algorithms for various things in genomics, and each of these plugins uses adapters to bind their behavior onto the RayPlatform core. The initial design of adapters in RayPlatform was based on a common interface, using pure virtual classes. Although this model is an elegant design, it also implies a significant overhead because adapters in RayPlatform are called in the main loop, which aims at running as fast as possible. There are at least two problems with virtual methods: they add additional indirections and they can not be inlined. Furthermore, using classes to create these adapters implies that it is required to declare the class in a .h, and to implement it in a .cpp. New adapter architecture Recently, we have moved away f