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JVM - VE Interface

VeProcess is the general interface to interacting with the Vector Engine. It has the following key functionalities:

  • Low-level functions to manage VE memory, and transfer from/to the VE and the VH (Vector Host), including integration with java.io.InputStream and java.io.OutputStream.
  • Higher level functions to call methods (by name) in libraries that are loaded on the Vector Engine, taking VeColVectors as inputs and producing new ones as outputs. These also wrap lower level methods provided by the AVEO API, such as argument setting, memory allocation, and similar. The argument types need to correspond to what is in the underlying functions.

Technically, VeProcess could have anything behind the scenes, including an x86 CPU implementation, however this has not been strictly needed in the development. In the plug-in lifecycle, VeProcess is created using veo_proc_create, and there should only really be one of this process instance per JVM process, in relation to the capabilities of AVEO. A DeferredVeProcess is created in order to deal with Spark's serializability issues and the need to lazy-load. In unit tests, on the other hand, the VeProcess is created via the functionality in WithVeProcess, in order to reduce the test run times by not having to bring up a new SparkContext.

Test suites extending WithVeProcess generally put the VeProcess through its paces. For example, ArrowTransferCheck verifies multi-function calls (eg turn one columnar batch into multiple, for the purpose of partitioning), and also validating all the different conversions from Arrow types to the VE and back. VeSerializerSpec is particularly important, and serialization will be discussed later.