One Minute Evaluations for 10-12 June

CS 598 - Concurrent Programming

• Topic: Interference - methods to avoid it. Mutual exclusion. Safety-liveness property; weak and strong scheduling.

  Didn't get: Global invariant method.

  One minute response: The tricky part about the global invariant method is the local parts developed for each of the threads. These have to be carefully constructed to make sure they don't have interference problems and they don't contradict the global invariant.

• Topic: Pre-post conditions.

  Didn't get: Synchronization at assembly level is difficult.

  One minute response: It is indeed, which is why you should do everything in your power to avoid it.

• Topic: Atomicity, global invariants, weakly/strongly fair scheduling, await statements, non-atomic data types.

  Didn't get: Proof of liveness.

  One minute response: Real liveness proofs are hard. It's best to think of liveness as a post-condition to be established by the computation.

• Topic: Atomic property, safety, at-most-once property.

  Didn't get: Avoid interference in concurrent programs.

  One minute response: Two people live together: One of them wants the windows open, the other the windows closed; one wants the lights on, the other the lights off; one wants the thermostat high, the other the thermostat low. When a thread changes the state of a computation expected by another thread, the first thread interferes with the second.

This page last modified on 16 July 2003.