Mind the gap!: bridging the dichotomy of design and implementation

This paper presents a revamping of a sparse linear algebra design pattern, targeting parallelization within scientific and engineering applications. A proof of concept implementation is developed to compare actual software practices and optimizations with those described in the original design pattern. The case study reveals that the design pattern did not tightly coincide with the design decisions in the implementation. The proposed revised pattern takes these decisions into account more explicitly, refining the structural representation of the pattern to make it more accessible to scientific developers attempting to achieve the benefits of pallelization now available in commodity systems.