Advanced Programming

Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of the course, the student will be able to:

• Describe the mechanism that operating systems provide to programmers to utilize kernel services (system calls).
• Recognize the differences between processes and threads as mechanisms that operating systems provide for executing user programs.
• List communication mechanisms between processes running on the same system (Interprocess Communication – IPC).
• Define the concurrency problem.
• Mention classic synchronization problems and how to solve them with one of the mechanisms that achieve synchronization.
• Explain the most common concurrency control mechanisms: mutexes, semaphores, monitors, condition variables.
• Synthesize his/her knowledge of threading and concurrency in developing multi-threaded applications with performance and serviceability requirements.

Indicative Module Content

• Processes/Threads
• Job scheduling in Operating Systems
• Process/Thread communication with/without shared memory
• Definition of concurrency in programming, the critical section problem, algorithms for the critical section problem, verification of concurrent programs
• Concurrency techniques: mutual exclusion, busy waiting, semaphores, monitors
• Introduction to distributed algorithms