Principles of Concurrent Programming

Concurrent and parallel programming has become ubiquitous in modern software and systems, where concurrency is leveraged to exploit physical parallelism and speed up computations, to provide interactive multi-tasking, and to handle interaction with asynchronous external events. This course aims to provide an introduction to the principles underlying concurrent systems, as well as to practical programming solutions for modeling and exploiting concurrency in programs. Domains where such principles and practices are relevant include operating systems, distributed systems, real-time systems, and multicore architectures. The concepts covered in the course include: - physical vs logical parallelism - concurrency problems (race conditions, interference, deadlock, fairness, livelock). - mutual exclusion - shared memory synchronization (using semaphores or fine grained locking) - message-passing synchronization (using message queues) The course illustrates practical solutions to concurrent programming using both imperative and functional programming languages. Thus, the course will also include short introductory tutorials on functional programming in general and on the functional programming language used in the course, providing sufficient background to understand and use the concurrent programming abstractions demonstrated by means of functional languages.