This course is concerned with the issues that arise when computational processes are supported in a computer system. The scope is broad enough to include discussion of all the layers of a computer system - from the hardware to large information systems applications, and all sizes of computer system - from systems as small as a single processor, to systems as large as the entire Internet. The principal areas of study are processes and process coordination, concurrency support in operating systems and high level languages, and distributed systems.
The following topics are addressed: operating system structure, process management, interaction between system components (processes, devices and processors), mutual exclusion, concurrent programming, semaphores and monitors, inter-process communication, distributed systems, crash resilience and persistent data, deadlock, transaction processing.

Upon completion of this course, the student will be able to:

• Enumerate and describe the concepts involved in the construction of concurrent and distributed systems
• Write programs that create cooperating subtasks which are Unix processes, and write Java programs which use threads
• Develop the components of a small distributed system in a teamwork setting
• Select appropriate mechanisms and apply them to the solution of problems in concurrent and distributed systems

Assignments (30%); Final Exam (70%)

Thirty one-hour lectures, nine two-hour tutorials/laboratory sessions.

COMP1110 or COMP1510 and COMP2100 or COMP2500 or COMP2300 or enrolment in 4710

Andrews, Gregory R. Foundations of Multithreaded, Parallel, and Distributed Programming, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 2000.

Bacon, Jean Concurrent Systems: An Integrated Approach to Operating Systems, Database, and Distributed Systems. International Computer Science Series. Addison-Wesley, Wokingham, England, 2nd edition, 1997.

Barnes, John ADA 2005 Addison-Wesley, 2006.

Ben-Ari, M.Principles of Concurrent and Distributed Programming. Prentice Hall, 1990.

Burnes, Allen & Wellings, Andy Real-Time Systems and Programming Languages, Addison Wesley, third edition, 2001.

Burnes, Allen, Wellings, Andy , Wellings Andrew J. & Barnes, John Concurrency in Ada , Cambridge University Press 1998.

Cohen, Norman H. Ada as a second language, McGraw-Hill series in computer science, second edition, 1996.

Coulouris, George, Dollimore, Jean & Kindberg, Tim Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design. Addison-Wesley, 2nd edition, 1994.