BEng Electrical and Electronic Engineering

This unit will cover the following topics:

(1) How autonomous peripherals improve CPU efficiency.

(2) The meaning parallel and time-slice concurrency.

(3) Programs, processes, and threads.

(4) How operating systems create concurrent systems.

(5) Problems with concurrent algorithms and the coding methods to solve them.

(6) Message passing methods.

(7) Other operating system methods, including memory, file and device management.

The topic of Concurrent Systems is about operating systems and the method of creating threads of code. This enables programs to be run at the same time, and enables algorithms to be parallelised to run much faster. We will look at how an operating system kernel facilitates concurrent systems through CPU scheduling and how we can write code to parallelise our software. We will use C++ in this unit, but the code is similar in other languages.

ILO 1: Explain the issues inherent in multi-threaded programs

ILO 2: Describe message parsing and its applications

ILO 3: Analyse how an operating system provides thread scheduling

ILO 4: Describe what makes a concurrent system

ILO 5: Develop concurrent programs in C++

21 Lectures, 1 Introductory Lab, 5 Worked Tutorial Sheets (online).

Coursework:

2 Blackboard tests - 30 Minutes each

Write a concurrent program in C++ to implement a given specification. - 10 hours

The coursework forms 20% of the unit assessment.

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C++ Concurrency in Action: Practical Multithreading, Anthony Williams, 2012

-covers the first part of the course.

Operating Systems : A Modern Perspective, G. Nutt

3rd edition, Addison-Wesley, 2003

-covers the second part of the course.