Lecture Notes | Links | Assignments | Tutorials

Past Exams | Tanenbaum Reading List

The course will be concerned with applications involving the interaction of concurrent processes: means of realising concurrency, and the use of modern interaction primitives (semaphores, message passing). The course will also give the students a basic introduction to the UNIX operating system and discuss the interaction of concurrent processes using C code developed on a UNIX system.

Goals and Learning Outcomes

•  be familiar with the fundamental principles of concurrent processes.
•  be familiar with key software optimisation techniques for real-time systems.
•  have acquired the basic skills necessary to work in a UNIX environment.

Syllabus

• Real-time Programming: Features of a real-time language.
• Real-time Optimisation: Arithmetic identities, Constant folding, Reduction in strength, Common sub-expression elimination, Loop invariant removal, Loop induction elimination, Loop unrolling, Loop jamming, Scaled numbers, Look-up tables, Imprecise computation (approximate reasoning), Memory optimisation.
• Introductory UNIX: Overview of the UNIX operating system,. UNIX implementations. Basic operations and commands, File redirection, Command shells, Communicating with remote systems, Manipulating processes.
• Concurrent processes: Meaning of a process. Natural analysis of real world applications in terms of interacting concurrent processes. Difficulty of mapping this onto the VonNeumann sequential architecture. Solutions based on parallel hardware architecture and/or pseudo-parallelism by time-slicing a single sequential processor. Process interaction.
• Inter-process communication: Synchronisation and communication. Use of semaphore synchronisation and shared memory communication. Critical section implementation. Examples using C code fragments. Producer/consumer problem. Problems of unintended side-effects and deadlocks. Use of message passing for synchronisation and communication.
• Deadlock: Formal analysis. Deadlock conditions. Resource allocation graph. Handling deadlock.
• Input/output architecture: I/O device classification. I/O hardware architecture. Controller/CPUinterface.

Course Textbooks

•    Tanenbaum, A.S., "Modern operating systems", Prentice-Hall, 1992.

•    Kernighan, B & Pike, R, “The UNIX programming environment”, Prentice-Hall, 1984.
•    Tanenbaum, A.S., "Operating systems - Design and implementation", Prentice-Hall, 1987.
•    Theaker, C.J. & Brookes, G.R., "Concepts of operating systems", Macmillan, 1983.
•    Ripps, D.L., "An implementation guide to real-time programming", Yourdon Press, 1990.

Links

• Introduction to UNIX Courses at NRC Canada:
• • local copy of NRC basic course.
  • local copy of NRC advanced course.
• The UNIX programming environment (Mark Burgess, Oslo College)
• • local copy (PDF)
  • local copy (html)
• UNIX C guide (Tim Love, CUED.)
• UNIXHELP for Users
• History of Creation of the UNIX Operating System
• A Brief History of UNIX by Charles Severance
• Introductory 4.4BSD IPC Tutorial
• Advanced 4.4BSD IPC Tutorial
• Block Floating Implementation on the TMS320C54x DSP
• UNIX System Programming (Shivakant Mishra, U. Colorado)
• Linux Programmer's Guide (see chapter 6 on IPC.)

Assignments

• Assignment ONE is an exercise to get acquainted with the UNIX operating system. A full individual report is due in by Monday, March 29th, 2004, 5:00 pm. Please read the assignment sheet carefully!
• 
  Assignment ONE - Results
• 
  Assignment ONE - Solution

• Assignment TWO is concerned with process management and inter-process communication in UNIX using C language. A full individual report is due in by Monday, April 26th, 2004, 5:00 pm. Please read the assignment sheet carefully!

• 
  Assignment TWO - Results
• 
  Assignment TWO - Solution

Tutorials

• Tutorial ONE
• Tutorial TWO
• Tutorial THREE

Latest revision: April 23rd, 2004.

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