CS 343 | SCS

An introduction to advanced control-structures with an emphasis on concurrency and writing concurrent programs at the programming-language level. Programming techniques and styles are examined to express complex forms of control flow, such as multi-level loop exit, data-structure iterators, exceptions, coroutines, and concurrency. Students will learn how to structure, implement and debug concurrent programs.

Intended Audience

CS 343 is intended for Computer Science students planning to do advanced high-level programming.

Related Courses

Hardware/Software

References

Schedule

Outline

Advanced Control Flow (3 hours)

Multi-exit loops, multi-level exits, exceptions (termination/resumption), iterators.

Coroutines (4 hours)

Introduction to Concurrency (3 hours)

Starting multiple threads, synchronizing and communication among threads. Ready queue, thread states, interrupts.

Mutual Exclusion (4 hours)

Software and hardware solutions for critical sections. Dekker and Peterson algorithms. Test and set.

Semaphores (4 hours)

Binary and counting semaphores. Baton passing and split binary semaphores. Bounded buffer and readers/writer. Semaphore implementation.

Concurrency Errors (3 hours)

Race condition, starvation, live-lock, deadlock: synchronization and mutual exclusion. Examine deadlock: prevention, avoidance and recovery.

High-Level Concurrency (6 hours)

Conditional critical regions, monitors, tasks. Internal and external scheduling of tasks. Rendezvous. Client/Server.

Increasing Concurrency (3 hours)

Server: buffering, secretary, administrator, workers, courier. Client: sync/async communication, tickets, call-backs, futures.

Other Concurrency Approaches (6 hours)

Concurrent programming languages: Ada, Java, Actors, Linda (tuple space). Threads/locks: pthreads. Threads/message-passing: PVM/MPI. Kernel threads (parallel execution). Remote procedure/method call. Distributed communication: sockets.