Concurrent Systems

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

No. of lectures: 12

Prerequisite course: Operating Systems  

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.

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.

Interprocess communication (IPC).

System structure; synchronisation primitives; semaphores and their implementation; shared memory mechanisms; no-shared-memory mechanisms; distributed IPC; remote procedure call (RPC).

Transactions.

Composite operations. Crashes and persistent data; deadlock; concurrency control for composite operations; crash recovery; distributed transactions.

Recommended books:

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

Pham, T.Q. & Garg, P.K. (1996). Multithreaded Programming with Windows NT. Prentice-Hall.