Common Design Pattern in Compute System

Some design pattern appears in very different subfield of Computer Science. This post is a list of such patterns.

Cache

Pipeline

Separation of Control Path and Data Path

In digital circuit, in distributed system (e.g. GFS), etc.

Pool

Thread pool in server, Buffer pool in database

Pre-allocate resource from system in advance, and use a data structure to let others obtain and release resource without construction / destruction.

Centralized management, good for ???

Log-structured / Append-only

Write at random position can be costly

Process one write at a time can be costly

Introducing, append-only / log-structured.

We use a log to record “write requests” (append new write request to log), and process a batch of requests at a time.

Also the added benefit of having historical version of data.

Can be found in

• database (LevelDB and Log-Structured Merge Tree)

• storage system (Log-structured File System, SSD Flash Translation Layer?)