Tomas Plachetka

Concurrent and Distributed Programming and Systems 2019/2020

Tuesday 9:50-13:00 M.VIII

The evaluation of work during the semester (homeworks) forms 50% of the final grade, at least 40% are required.

• Motivation. Separation of algorithmic and concurrent aspects in C. Memory and time complexity of programs with I/O operations and dynamic memory allocation. Polling and its consequences.
• Measuring time. Sources of time in PCs, real-time clock (RTC), programmable interrupt timer (PIT). Access to time sources and alarms in POSIX processes. Precision of time measurements.
  Lecture notes
  Tutorial on PC timers
  Linux man clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC_RAW, ...)
  Linux Device Drivers (Chapter 7)
  
• Threads. Thread state diagram. Shared variables, atomicity of memory accesses, critical regions. Decker's and Peterson's algorithms, assumptions on memory accesses. Deadlock, livelock. POSIX threads (pthread), mutexes, condition variables.
  Lecture notes
  Open Group pthread reference
  A pthread tutorial
  Another pthread tutorial
  Historical recommendation (when to use threads and when not, 1995)
• Libraries, thread-safety. Case study: shared stack.
• Threads in Java. Creation of a thread. Synchronised methods, synchronised blocks. Built-in reentrant mutexes. Methods join(), wait(), signal(). Problem with a direct use of synchronized methods.
  SCJP Sun Certified Programmer for Java (Chapter 9)
  H. Schildt: Java, The Complete Reference (Chapter 11)
• Multi-level memory. Examples of counter-intuitive behaviour of programs and their explanation. Means of memory synchronisation in C and Java. Volatile variables, implicit memory synchronisation.
  Java memory model (JSR133)
  Memory models

Homeworks

Please send me your solutions via email.

The firm deadline for submission of overdue homeworks is 9.12.2019.

Homework 1 (due to 12.11.)

Homework 2 (due to 19.11.)

Homework 3 (due to 6.12.)

Homework 4 (due to 6.12.)