Task Manager/Dispatcher Interfaces

The following describes ‘type interfaces.’ See Type Interfaces for more info on what that is.

The following are type interfaces that allow the creation of several instances of a task, possibly reporting intermediate status, and collecting results in the end.

Such interfaces are required, for example, to run parallel tasks with the OMP task dispatcher, Tomographer::MultiProc::OMP::TaskDispatcher.

In the future, I hope we can also write an MPI implementation using the same interfaces. (Hopefully everything works fine if ResultType and ConstantDataType is serializable)

A task is implemented by a Task Interface. It may refer to some global, constant data (the parameters of the problem) stored in a struct (referred to as ConstantDataType in the following docs). Each Task generates a result, which is sent to and collected by a type responsible for aggregating the data in a usable form (e.g., calculating an average and std. deviation), which compiles with the ResultsCollector Interface. The task manager exposes an API to interact with the Task objects: it is the TaskManagerIface Interface. This interface may be used for example in order to submit intermediate status reports.

Documented type interfaces:

• Task Interface
• ResultsCollector Interface
• TaskManagerIface Interface