Concurrent Systems and Applications

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

No. of lectures: 24

Prerequisite courses: Programming in Java, Operating Systems

This course is a prerequisite for Operating Systems II, Distributed Systems (Part II), Advanced Systems Topics (Part II).

Aims

The aims of this course are (a) to introduce the modular design of application software, using the facilities of the Java programming languages 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. [5 lectures]

• Further Java topics. Graphical user interfaces. Reflection and serialization. Finalizers. Class loaders. [5 lectures]

• Communication within an address space. Reasons for multi-threaded programming. Correctness criteria. Mutual exclusion locks and condition variables. Alternative concurrency-control primitives. [5 lectures]

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

• Transactions. Correctness criteria, serializability, ACID properties. Crash recovery. Two-phase locking. Timestamp ordering. Optimistic concurrency control. [4 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

• be able to illustrate the use of object oriented techniques through examples of the kind seen in the Java standard libraries

• 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 transactions and their application in a range of systems

Recommended books

Bacon, J. & Harris, T. (2003) Operating Systems or Bacon, J. (1997) Concurrent Systems (2nd ed.). Addison-Wesley.
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.