Concurrent Systems

Lecturer: Dr J.M. Bacon (jmb@cl.cam.ac.uk)

No. of lectures: 12

Prerequisite course: Operating Systems

This course is a prerequisite for Distributed Systems (Part II) and Further Java (Part IB).

Aims

The aims of this course are to introduce the modular design of systems software and the principles of its dynamic execution; to explore the need for and implementation of concurrency control; to study the concept of transaction and its implementation in operating systems and database systems.

Lectures

• Requirements. Requirements for support of concurrency in systems. Overview of OS structure and dynamic invocation; modules, processes and protocols. Microkernel versus closed OS structure. Object modelling. [2 lectures]

• Device, I/O and process management. Revision overview of device and process management and process scheduling. Support for concurrency in programming languages. Thread management in language systems and operating systems. [2 lectures]

• Interprocess communication (IPC). System structure; synchronisation primitives; concurrency control without hardware support. Semaphores and their implementation; examples. Shared memory mechanisms; no-shared-memory mechanisms. Distributed IPC; remote procedure call (RPC). [4 lectures]

• Transactions. Composite operations. Crashes and persistent data. Deadlock detection and recovery. Concurrency control for composite operations. Crash recovery. [4 lectures]

Objectives

At the end of the course students should

• understand how systems are executed dynamically and understand the concepts of process, thread and address space

• understand the need for and implementation of concurrency control

• understand the concept of transaction and its application in a range of systems

Recommended books

Bacon, J. (1997). Concurrent Systems. Addison-Wesley (2nd ed.).
Tanenbaum, A.S. (1992). Modern Operating Systems. Prentice-Hall.
Silberschatz, A. & Galvin, P.B. (1998). Operating System Concepts. Addison-Wesley (5th ed.).
Gray, J. & Reuter, A. (1993). Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques. Morgan Kaufmann.