Pipelines: Merging two different buffers

[a_varsha]

Hi,

I am new to TBB and currently implemented a simpleTBB program using Pipeline. The I/P filter passes an integer array to the Transform filter which then performs an operation on the array and the O/P filter writes it out.

Now, I want to pass two differentarrays into the pipeline and have the transform filter merge the two buffers based on some criteria. The O/P filter then prints out the merged result. I want to know if this is possible using the Pipeline and Filter classes . My question is more on 'how' to pass two different arrays using the I/P filter.

Rgds.

[ARCH_R_Intel]

I would be inclined to use a std::pair object that points to the two arrays. Pass the pair objects through the pipeline. The transform stage should take a std::pair as its input and return a pointer to the merged results as its output.

If you want the I/P filter to process the pairs of input arrays in parallel, the simplest way is to write a parallel loop that loops over i=0,1 and does one of the arrays for each index. TBB is good about supporting nested parallelism, so putting the parallel_for inside a pipeline stage shouldn't cause any surprises.

An alternative, if the I/P operation is the same for each array, is to pass arrays into the I/P stage, and then write a serial "pairing" stage that does pairing. The pairing stage would return either the paired arrays (say a std::pair) or a dummy object. Each time the pairing stage is run, it inspects whether it has previously accumulated an array. If so, it pairs it with the new incoming array and returns a std::pair. Otherwise it accumulates the array and returns a dummy object. Later stages of the pipeline would have to know to skip processing of dummy objects.