Tomas Plachetka

Concurrent and Distributed Programming and Systems 2022/2023

Tuesday 11:30 M.262

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.
Historical recommendation (when to use threads and when not, 1995)
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
A tutorial on PC timers
Linux man clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC_RAW, ...)
Threads. Thread state diagram. Shared variables, atomicity of memory accesses, critical regions. Decker's and Peterson's algorithms, assumptions on memory accesses.
Lecture notes
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.
H. Boehm: Threads cannot be implemented as a library, ACM PLDI, 2005
Java memory model (JSR133)

For writing programs in C, use this template. Make sure that 0 errors and 0 warnings are produced during the compilation and linking (use make).

Updated by Tomas Plachetka, Dec/14/2022