Concurrent Systems and Applications

Lecturer: Mr T.L. Harris (tlh20@cl.cam.ac.uk)

No. of lectures: 24

Prerequisite courses: Programming in Java, Operating Systems

Aims

The aims of this course are (a) to introduce the modular design of applications and systems software, using the facilities of the Java programming language as running examples, (b) to explore the need for and implementation of concurrency control and communication in inter-process and intra-process contexts and (c) to introduce the concept of transactions and their implementation and uses.

Lectures

• Programming with objects. Revision overview of the Java programming language. Structuring programs using encapsulation and inheritance. Design patterns. Graphical user interfaces. Reflection and serialization. [5 lectures]

• Multi-threaded programming. Concurrency as the norm. Thread control in Java. Thread scheduling and OS implementation schemes. [3 lectures]

• Communication within an address space. General problems, pitfalls and race conditions. Simple atomic operations. Locking, semaphores, monitors, conditional critical regions. [5 lectures]

• Communication between address spaces. General problems in distributed systems. Naming. Access control. IDLs. Java RMI case study. Message passing and the use of sockets in Java. [5 lectures]

• Transactions. Correctness criteria, serializability, ACID properties. Crash recovery. Applying these techniques in Java. [4 lectures]

• Further Java topics. Memory models. Class loaders. Finalizers. [2 lectures]

Objectives

At the end of the course students should

• understand the terminology of object oriented programming and be able to use it with precision

• understand how systems are executed dynamically and understand the concepts of processes, threads and address spaces

• understand the need for and implementation of concurrency control

• understand different mechanisms for communication within or between applications and evaluate their trade-offs in different scenarios

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

Recommended books

Bacon, J. (1997). Concurrent Systems. Addison-Wesley (2nd ed.).

Bracha, G., Gosling, J., Joy, B. & Steele, G. (2000). The Java Language Specification. Addison-Wesley (2nd ed.). http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/

Lea, D. (1999). Concurrent Programming in Java. Addison-Wesley (2nd ed.).

Gamma, E., Helm, R., Johnson, R., Vlissides, J. (1994). Design Patterns. Addison-Wesley.