Doel vak

This course provides a comprehensive presentation of the foundations and
programming principles for multicore computing devices.

Specific learning objectives are:
* To provide insight into fundamental notions of multicore computing and
their relation to practice: locks, read-modify-write operations, mutual
exclusion, consensus, construction of atomic multi-reader-multi-writer
registers, lost wakeups, ABA problem.
* To provide insight into algorithms and frameworks for multicore
computing and their application in multi-threaded programs: mutual
exclusion algorithms, spin locks, monitors, barriers,
AtomicStampedReference class in Java, thread pools in Java,
transactional memory.
* Analyzing algoritmes for multicore computing with regard to
functionality and performance: linearizability, starvation- and wait-
freeness, Amdahl's law, compute efficiency gain of parallelism.
* Mastering elementary datastructures in the context of multicore
computing: lists, queues, stacks.
* Programming in multi-threaded Java, and performing experiments with
such programs.

Inhoud vak

The course consists of the following topics: Shared memory, mutual
exclusion, synchronization operations, concurrent data structures,
scheduling, transactional memory, and a multithreaded programming
assignment.

Onderwijsvorm

4 hours per week HC, 4 hours per week WC.

Toetsvorm

The written exam counts for 75% and the programming assignment for 25%
of the final mark.

Both for the written exam and the programming assignment at least a 5.0
must be obtained (and the overall average mark should be at least 5.5).

Only students that achieved at least a 3.0 for their initial programming
assignment are offered a resit opportunity for this assignment.

Literatuur

Maurice Herlihy, Nir Shavit, The Art of Multiprocessor Programming,
Morgan Kaufmann, 2008.

Doelgroep

3CS

Overige informatie

The homepage of the course is at http://www.cs.vu.nl/~tcs/cm/

Aanbevolen voorkennis

Datastructures & Algorithms

Programming in Java