Design patterns for scientific computations on sparse matrices

We discuss object-oriented software design patterns in the context of scientific computations on sparse matrices. Design patterns arise when multiple independent development efforts produce very similar designs, yielding an evolutionary convergence onto a good solution: a flexible, maintainable, high-performance design. We demonstrate how to engender these traits by implementing an interface for sparse matrix computations on NVIDIA GPUs starting from an existing sparse matrix library. We also present initial performance results