Computer Laboratory – Course material 2008–09: Concurrent Systems and Applications

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Concurrent Systems and Applications

Lecturers: Dr S.M. Hand, Dr T.L. Harris, Dr A.F. Blackwell and Dr T.W. Hong

No. of lectures: 21

Prerequisite courses: Programming in Java, Operating Systems

This course is a prerequisite for the Part II courses Distributed Systems and Advanced Systems Topics.

Aims

The aims of this course are (a) to introduce the modular design of application software, using the facilities of the Java programming language as a running example, (b) to explore the principal mechanisms of inter-process communication, the concept of transactions and their implementation and uses, (c) to introduce the need for concurrency control within a process and the techniques for structuring concurrent programs.

Lectures

Java review. Objects and classes. Packages, interfaces, nested classes. Design patterns. [3 lectures, TWH]
Distributed systems. Introduction. TCP and UDP. RPC and RMI. Transactions. Enforcing isolation. Crash recovery and logging. [6 lectures, SMH]
Advanced Java. Reflection and serialisation. Graphical interfaces. Memory management. Native methods and class loaders. Generic types. [5 lectures, TWH]
Testing. Software testing strategies. [1 lecture, AFB]
Concurrency. Threads. Mutual exclusion. Deadlock. Condition synchronization. Worked examples. Low-level synchronization. [6 lectures, TLH]

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 different mechanisms for communication between applications and evaluate their trade-offs in different scenarios
understand the concept of transactions and their application in a range of systems
understand why software testing is not always easy and the techniques used to achieve thorough testing
understand the need for and implementation of concurrency control

Recommended reading

* Bacon, J. & Harris, T. (2003). Operating systems or Bacon, J. (1997) Concurrent systems (2nd ed.). Addison-Wesley.
Myers, G.J. (2004). The art of software testing. Wiley (2nd ed.).
Lea, D. (1999). Concurrent programming in Java. 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/
Gamma, E., Helm, R., Johnson, R. & Vlissides, J. (1994). Design patterns. Addison-Wesley.

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