Pipeline (software)

In software engineering, a pipeline consists of a chain of processing elements (processes, threads, coroutines, functions, etc.), arranged so that the output of each element is the input of the next; the name is by analogy to a physical pipeline. Usually some amount of buffering is provided between consecutive elements. The information that flows in these pipelines is often a stream of records, bytes or bits, and the elements of a pipeline may be called filters; this is also called the pipes and filters design pattern. Connecting elements into a pipeline is analogous to function composition.

Narrowly speaking, a pipeline is linear and one-directional, though sometimes the term is applied to more general flows. For example, a primarily one-directional pipeline may have some communication in the other direction, known as a return channel or backchannel, as in the lexer hack, or a pipeline may be fully bi-directional. Flows with one-directional tree and directed acyclic graph topologies behave similarly to (linear) pipelines – the lack of cycles makes them simple – and thus may be loosely referred to as "pipelines".

Pipelines are often implemented in a multitasking OS, by launching all elements at the same time as processes, and automatically servicing the data read requests by each process with the data written by the upstream process – this can be called a multiprocessed pipeline. In this way, the CPU will be naturally switched among the processes by the scheduler so as to minimize its idle time. In other common models, elements are implemented as lightweight threads or as coroutines to reduce the OS overhead often involved with processes. Depending upon the OS, threads may be scheduled directly by the OS or by a thread manager. Coroutines are always scheduled by a coroutine manager of some form.

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