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Quadratics

Quadratics is a solver for quadratic equations with integer coefficients, utilizing multithreading capabilities of the hardware.

Usage

Simply call the program and specify coefficients as command line arguments:

> ./quadratics [args]

Features

  • Solves quadratic equations

    > ./quadratics 1 -5 6
(1 -5 6) => (2.000000,3.000000) Xmin=2.500000

  • Finds extremums for true-quadratics (ignoring linear functions)

    > ./quadratics 1 4 -5
(1 4 -5) => (-5.000000,1.000000) Xmin=-2.000000
> ./quadratics 0 1 2
(0 1 2) => (-2.000000) Xmin=-2.000000

  • Processes many sets of parameters by treys in a multithreaded fashion, if a particular trey is ill-formed, it is ignored

    > ./quadratics 0 1 2 1 -5 6 as df 5 1 4 -5
(0 1 2) => (-2.000000) Xmin=-2.000000
(1 4 -5) => (-5.000000,1.000000) Xmin=-2.000000
(1 -5 6) => (2.000000,3.000000) Xmin=2.500000

Implementation

  • Uses Object-Oriented Design
  • Multithreading is implemented with Consumer-Producer pattern, with producer parsing the command line arguments and consumer solving the equations and outputting the results

Observations and possible improvements

  • As per specification, the program to use command line args, which limits the size of input. A better approach would be to also allow reading from standard input stream for processing of large dataset files.
  • The simplicity of the task makes the threading an overkill, a sequential solution is significantly faster when it is passed little data, as spinning up threads and allocating memory for them is very expensive.
  • On Linux threaded approach yields about 30% performance on larger datasets (1000 equations), but on Windows, with limited testing, the price for spinning up thread seems astronomical, and threading is extremely slow.
  • Looking at profiler, it seems that the most cycles are spent on std::to_string converting the solution roots, so I changed it to std::to_chars which made it a bit better. Parsing is a small load, which makes sense, since we're using command-line arguments, and they are already in memory.
  • For Linux the optimal number of solver threads seems to be around the number of actual hardware cores. I leave auto detection to use logical core, but perhaps halving this number will be a good decision, more testing is needed.

Building

To build the binary you will need CMake version 3.20 or later, C++17-compliant compiler and a build system, for example Ninja:

# Generate build system script
> cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE:STRING=Release -B./build

# Build the binary
> cmake --build ./build --config Release --target quadratics_exe --

Testing

To build additional utilities like quadratics_gen for test data generation you can supply additional targets to cmake or build them all.

# Build all targets including `quadratics_gen`
> cmake --build ./build --config Release --target all --
> ./build/quadratics_gen 3
 -2 -58 -94 3 11 61 -75 -42 55

Additional options are available for testing and analysis that can be supplied to Cmake with -D prefix:

  • ENABLE_COVERAGE for code coverage
  • ENABLE_ASAN for address sanitizer
  • ENABLE_TSAN for thread sanitizer
  • ENABLE_TESTING for unit tests
  • ENABLE_CLANG_TIDY for clang-tidy static analysis
  • ENABLE_CPPCHECK for cppcheck static analysis
  • FORCE_COLORED_OUTPUT for compiler colored input (enabled by default)

Note that for tests doctest library needs to be installed and findable by CMake. For example, it can be installed with vcpkg, don't forget to supply -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE:STRING=<path>/vcpkg/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake to CMake during build system script generation to for it to discover the libraries.

For example:

# Build tests and run them
> cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE:STRING=Release -DENABLE_TESTING:BOOL=TRUE -B./build
> cmake --build ./build --config Release --target quadratics_test --
> ./build/quadratics_test

[doctest] doctest version is "2.4.9"
[doctest] run with "--help" for options
===============================================================================
[doctest] test cases:  5 |  5 passed | 0 failed | 0 skipped
[doctest] assertions: 12 | 12 passed | 0 failed |
[doctest] Status: SUCCESS!