Concurrent Programming

This book is devoted to the most difficult part of concurrent programming, namely synchronization concepts, techniques and principles when the cooperating entities are asynchronous, communicate through a shared memory, and may experience failures. Synchronization is no longer a set of tricks but, due to research results in recent decades, it relies today on sane scientific foundations as explained in this book. In this book the author explains synchronization and the implementation of concurrent objects, presenting in a uniform and comprehensive way the major theoretical and practical results of the past 30 years. Among the key features of the book are a new look at lock-based synchronization (mutual exclusion, semaphores, monitors, path expressions); an introduction to the atomicity consistency criterion and its properties and a specific chapter on transactional memory; an introduction to mutex-freedom and associated progress conditions such as obstruction-freedom and wait-freedom; a presentation of Lamport's hierarchy of safe, regular and atomic registers and associated wait-free constructions; a description of numerous wait-free constructions of concurrent objects (queues, stacks, weak counters, snapshot objects, renaming objects, etc.); a presentation of the computability power of concurrent objects including the notions of universal construction, consensus number and the associated Herlihy's hierarchy; and a survey of failure detector-based constructions of consensus objects. The book is suitable for advanced undergraduate students and graduate students in computer science or computer engineering, graduate students in mathematics interested in the foundations of process synchronization, and practitioners and engineers who need to produce correct concurrent software. The reader should have a basic knowledge of algorithms and operating systems.

“When you begin using multi-threading throughout an application, the importance of clean architecture and design is critical. . . . This places an emphasis on understanding not only the platform’s capabilities but also emerging best practices. Joe does a great job interspersing best practices alongside theory throughout his book.” – From the Foreword by Craig Mundie, Chief Research and Strategy Officer, Microsoft Corporation Author Joe Duffy has risen to the challenge of explaining how to write software that takes full advantage of concurrency and hardware parallelism. In Concurrent Programming on Windows, he explains how to design, implement, and maintain large-scale concurrent programs, primarily using C# and C++ for Windows. Duffy aims to give application, system, and library developers the tools and techniques needed to write efficient, safe code for multicore processors. This is important not only for the kinds of problems where concurrency is inherent and easily exploitable—such as server applications, compute-intensive image manipulation, financial analysis, simulations, and AI algorithms—but also for problems that can be speeded up using parallelism but require more effort—such as math libraries, sort routines, report generation, XML manipulation, and stream processing algorithms. Concurrent Programming on Windows has four major sections: The first introduces concurrency at a high level, followed by a section that focuses on the fundamental platform features, inner workings, and API details. Next, there is a section that describes common patterns, best practices, algorithms, and data structures that emerge while writing concurrent software. The final section covers many of the common system-wide architectural and process concerns of concurrent programming. This is the only book you’ll need in order to learn the best practices and common patterns for programming with concurrency on Windows and .NET.

Here, one of the leading figures in the field provides a comprehensive survey of the subject, beginning with prepositional logic and concluding with concurrent programming. It is based on graduate courses taught at Cornell University and is designed for use as a graduate text. Professor Schneier emphasises the use of formal methods and assertional reasoning using notation and paradigms drawn from programming to drive the exposition, while exercises at the end of each chapter extend and illustrate the main themes covered. As a result, all those interested in studying concurrent computing will find this an invaluable approach to the subject.

If you have a working knowledge of Haskell, this hands-on book shows you how to use the language’s many APIs and frameworks for writing both parallel and concurrent programs. You’ll learn how parallelism exploits multicore processors to speed up computation-heavy programs, and how concurrency enables you to write programs with threads for multiple interactions. Author Simon Marlow walks you through the process with lots of code examples that you can run, experiment with, and extend. Divided into separate sections on Parallel and Concurrent Haskell, this book also includes exercises to help you become familiar with the concepts presented: Express parallelism in Haskell with the Eval monad and Evaluation Strategies Parallelize ordinary Haskell code with the Par monad Build parallel array-based computations, using the Repa library Use the Accelerate library to run computations directly on the GPU Work with basic interfaces for writing concurrent code Build trees of threads for larger and more complex programs Learn how to build high-speed concurrent network servers Write distributed programs that run on multiple machines in a network

This textbook is designed as a first book on concurrent programming for computer science undergraduates, and provides a comprehensive introduction to the problems of concurrency. Concurrency is of vital importance in many areas of computer science, particularly in operating systems. It is also increasingly being taught in undergraduate courses. The book builds on the student's familiarity with sequential programming in a high level language, which will make it very accessible to computer science students. The book is concerned mainly with the high level aspects of concurrency, which will be equally applicable to traditional time sliced or more recent truly parallel systems.

Software -- Programming Languages.

Software -- Operating Systems.

Mathematics of Computing -- Parallelism.