Software pipelines

Granville Barnett — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 12:19:42 GMT

There is a pretty interesting architecture based on software pipelines that will at least allow your systems to utilize many-core processors in a far easier manner than other alternatives. This approach has a lot in common with fluid dynamics in that some principals are the same.

All service requests hit something called a pipeline distributor. The pipeline distributor routes the request to the appropriate pipeline. What is pretty nice about this approach is that the pipelines within a pool can delegate requests to other pipelines within the same pool or even delegate requests to another pipeline distributor that maps requests to a different set of pipelines within a different pipeline pool.

I can’t do this approach justice myself via a simple blog post but upon further searching I came across a rough cuts book named Software Pipelines: The Key to Capitalizing on the Multi-core Revolution. I’ve quickly skimmed the book just now and it looks as though it covers the subject quite well.

Granville Barnett : manycore

Software pipelines