Elements of Concurrent Programming
Fourth Edition

Area 09 – Ingegneria industriale e dell'informazione

This book introduces the reader to the elementary notions of the theory of concurrent computation. We consider the approaches based on vectorization, shared variables, and handshaking communications and we study a few problems such as the computation of the prefix sums, the mutually exclusive access to resources, the detection of distributed termination, and the serializability of database transactions. We present the solutions to these problems by making use of semaphores, shared variables, conditional critical regions, monitors, and locking protocols. A chapter of the book is devoted to elementary concurrent programming in Java so that the reader may see in action some of the basic programming techniques. We also introduce the reader to the Calculus for Communicating Systems which has been proposed by Prof. Robin Milner, and we illustrate its use for the formal proof of correctness of concurrent programs.

SINTESI