Concurrent Programming 2: Concurrent Object-Oriented Programming

Bertrand Meyer, spring semester 2009

Important note (12.2.09): This version of the page is provisional, including information about grading. The information will be finalized at the time of the first lecture (24.2.2009).

General

News

Course Description

Title and ID

Concurrent Programming 2: Concurrent Object-Oriented Programming
Course code: 251-0268-00L

Prerequisites

The course assumes good knowledge of object-oriented principles and programming techniques. Experience with Eiffel and with concurrent programming is helpful but not required. It is strongly suggested to precede this course with the Winter semester course Concurrent Programming 1: Principles and Introduction.

Objectives

The goal is to provide students with solid knowledge of:

• State-of-the-art concurrent programming models, languages, and platforms
• Foundations for reasoning about concurrent and distributed programs
• Approaches blending object-orientation, distribution, and concurrency
• Designing applications with concurrent objects
• Some open issues, like applications to embedded and real-time systems

Organisation

The course is split into two major parts:

• COOP: a bottom-up, more historical, perspective on concurrent programming. Illustrations are thus made in various programming languages, though Java will be the main focus.
• SCOOP: concurrent programming with SCOOP. This will part will take a more top-down approach by illustrating issues related to concurrency through the SCOOP model.

Grading

Important : No Testat is delivered for the course. The only way to get a grade is to take the written exam and submit the project. This applies regardless of your department or status.

• 50% Project: development of a concurrent application using SCOOP
• 50% Exam: all presented topics excluding SCOOP. The exam will be held during the lecture on 26.5.2009.

Recommended Texts

• Maurice Herlihy, Nir Shavit: The Art of Multiprocessor Programming. Morgan Kaufmann, 2008.
• Piotr Nienaltowski: Practical framework for contract-based concurrent object-oriented programming.

Further Reading

• Allen B. Downey: The Little Book of Semaphores Second Edition. Green Tea Press, 2005.
• Gul Agha, Peter Wegner, Akinori Yonezawa (Editors): Research Directions in Concurrent Object-Oriented Programming. MIT Press, 1993.
• Gregory R. Andrews: Foundations of Multithreaded, Parallel, and Distributed Programming. Pearson Addison Wesley, 1999.
• Mordechai Ben-Ari: Principles of Concurrent and Distributed Programming. Prentice Hall, 1990.
• Howard Bowman and John Derrick (Editors): Formal methods for distributed processing: a survey of object-oriented approaches. Cambridge University Press, 2001.
• Bertrand Meyer: Object Oriented Software Construction, second edition, Chapter 30. Prentice Hall, 1997.
• Piotr Nienaltowski, Volkan Arslan, Bertrand Meyer: Concurrent object-oriented programming on .NET. IEE Proceedings Software, Special Issue on ROTOR, vol. 150, no. 5, 308-314, October 2003.
• Piotr Nienaltowski, Bertrand Meyer: Contracts for concurrency, CORDIE'06, July 2006, York, UK.
• Piotr Nienaltowski: Flexible locking in SCOOP. CORDIE'06, July 2006, York, UK. 
• Volkan Arslan, Bertrand Meyer: Asynchronous Exceptions in Concurrent Object-Oriented Programming. CORDIE'06, July 2006, York, UK.

Contacts

• The course mailing list is concourse (at) se.inf.ethz.ch. It will reach the professor, the assistants and all the students.
• Contact assistant for the course: Benjamin Morandi.

Lectures

Schedule

Slides

Exercises

Schedule

Assignments

Last modified: 25.5.2009 by Benjamin Morandi