Concepts of Concurrent Computation

Bertrand Meyer, Sebastian Nanz, spring semester 2010

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Course Description

Title and ID

Concepts of Concurrent Computation
Course code: 252-0268-00L

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.

Objectives

Concurrent programming is one of the major challenges in software development. The "Concepts of Concurrent Computation" course explores important models of concurrency, with a special emphasis on concurrent object-oriented programming and process calculi.

After completing this course, students will understand the principles and techniques of concurrent programming, supporting theories (CSP, CCS) allowing formal reasoning about concurrent systems, advances in concurrent object-oriented programming, and applications to multithreading, distribution, Web services and real-time.

Grading

Important : No Testat is delivered for the course. The assessment consists of a project (50%) and a written semester end exam (50%) for which no supporting material is allowed. 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. The performance assessment is only offered at the end after the course unit. Repetition only possible after re-enrolling.

Recommended Texts

• Bertrand Meyer, Sebastian Nanz: Concepts of Concurrent Computation (draft)
• Maurice Herlihy, Nir Shavit: The Art of Multiprocessor Programming. Morgan Kaufmann, 2008.
• Piotr Nienaltowski: Practical framework for contract-based concurrent object-oriented programming.
• Benjamin Morandi, Sebastian S. Bauer, and Bertrand Meyer: SCOOP - A contract-based concurrent object-oriented programming model.

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

• Course assistants: Benjamin Morandi and Scott West.

Lectures

Schedule

Slides

Exercises

Schedule

Assignments

Last modified: 10.1.2011 by Benjamin Morandi