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CxxUtils - Add DynamicArray container

Johannes Junggeburth requested to merge jojungge/athena:dynamic_array into master

Hi everybody,

in !47670 (closed), we needed a container with dynamic memory allocation and that supports the multi-dimensional C-array syntax in order to keep the number of changes small. One solution might be to use the ugly construct of

std::vector<std::vector<std::vector<int>>> my_vec;

Therefore I decided to write the DynamicArraycontainer which is based on a std::vector and supports the required syntax features.

    CxxUtils::DynamicArray<unsigned int, 3> myArray(3,5,6);
    for (unsigned int i =0 ; i < 3; ++i){
       for (unsigned int j=0; j < 5; ++j){
          for (unsigned int k =0; k < 6; ++k){
              myArray[i][j][k] = 5;
          }
       }
    }

Given that the class is quite generic and therefore has potential more usecases than BIS78 cabling - at least, I spontaneously know dozens of places in the muon code - I thought it might be useful to put this somewhere central such that others can also benefit from it. So I cleaned-up the code added some more documentation & wrote a unit test.

The unit test also contains a benchmark part. This is deactivated by dummy compiler flags as it relies on TStopWatch & TRandom and ROOT is not currently a requirement of CxxUtils. I benchmarked the code with the following parameters

    constexpr size_t dim1 = 200;
    constexpr size_t dim2 = 300;
    constexpr size_t dim3 = 100;
    constexpr size_t dim4 = 50;
    constexpr size_t total_dim = dim1*dim2*dim3*dim4;
    constexpr int random_access = 100000000;

and also instantiated a classical C array as a performance reference.

Allocation of 300000000 elements took 0.34 seconds.
Assignment to -999 took 0.15 seconds.

Fine that basically tests the power of the std::vector

Filling test with random values

Element by element assignment using [][][][] operators took 161.5 seconds.

vs.

Element by element assignment for the classical array took 161.1 seconds.

Random read access

Random memory access using [][][][] took 55.55 seconds
Random memory access using get(i,j,k,l) took 55.03 seconds

vs.

Random memory access for the classical array took 55.34 seconds

Swapping of two random elements

Random swapping of 2 elements using [][][][] took 68.17 seconds.
Random swapping of 2 elements using get(i,j,k,l) took 67.82 seconds.

vs.

Random swapping of 2 elements for the classical array took 71.78 seconds.

Overall the performance is quite comparable with the classical C-array

Let me tag: @ssnyder, @christos, @sroe, @akraszna in cases they've comments/objections in adding this class here.

Tagging: @goblirsc, @pgadow, @sabidi, @sangelid, @npetters, @atlasbot for another episode of the philosopher of the day

grafik

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