The course is aimed at providing students with a comprehensive vision of the foundations of concurrent and distributed programming. The main focus of the lectures is on system models and on different types of frameworks intended to support the development of concurrent systems at different abstraction levels and on different underlying platforms.

Students will acquire the basic skills to participate in the design, implementation and integration of concurrent and distributed software systems, possibly made of heterogeneous components.

Prerequisites: knowledge of Operating Systems basics, and mastering of Java and C/C++.

-   ATTENTION: The oral exam planned for June 28th, 2018 has been rescheduled on July 3rd, 2018 h. 9:00 am - room: ADII 2 (lab Blu). As usual, the exam requires prior booking on the Exam Sign-in Portal.

-  The dates for oral exams are reported on the website of the School of Engineering. Students are required to register through the Exam Sign-in Portal at least two days before the exam date.

 

First lecture on Mon. Sep. 25th, 2017

Mon. 11:30-13:30 ADII 1 (usually, Bechini); Tue. 14:30-16:30 ADII 1 (usually, Bechini); Wed. 8:30-10:30 ADII 1 (usually, Bechini); Thu. 13:30-15:30 ADII 2 (usually, Lettieri)

The lectures' schedule and relative updates, as well as exam dates, are available on a public Google Cal, which can be imported with the following ICS address:
https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/orl95i8nga1ar07d2g9fmedvg4%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

A detailed description is available via the record of lessons (see the left menu item).
Hereafter, a cathegorized list of topics can be interactively explored.

The final test is organized as follows:

a)   development of a project; specifications must be agreed upon with the teacher; the finalized work must be shown to the teacher for final approval prior to the oral exam (not in the same date)
b)   oral exam (possibly with written exercises), on all the topics covered by the course.

The main reference material is represented by class notes.
All the course contents are covered within the textbooks and other material reported hereafter. These references can also be taken as suggestions for in-depth discussions on class topics.

Books:

T1 - Title        Operating System Concepts 9th ed.          Authors   Abraham Silberschatz, Peter B. Galvin, Greg Gagne          Pub.        Wiley          ISBN       9781118093757          Notes:     A classical resource on OSs,                        discussing synchronization problems as well.

T2 - Title        Distributed Systems - Concepts and Design 5th ed.          Authors   George Coulouris, Jean Dollimore, Tim Kindberg, Gordon Blair          Pub.        Addison-Wesley          ISBN10    0132143011          Notes:     A comprehensive overview of distributed systems,                        addressing both theoretical and architectural issues.

Classwork material: Provided after each lab session. - CW01 (data races, ThreadLocal, AtomicInteger, Peterson) - CW02 (bounded buffer with condition variables and semaphores) - CW03 (task executors, thread pooling, futures) - CW04 (periodic task scheduler, benchmarking) - CW05 (unit testing, custom synchronizer) - CW06 (RMI example) - CW07 (basic use of Servlets) - CW08 (4 projects - stateless/stateful session EJBs) - CW09 (JEE project with JMS communication and Message-driven EJB)

Misc:  S1/2/3/4 - Slides on related topics, available on the web: Generics, Nested classes, JCF, and JUnit  S5 - Slides on Java Executor Framework (from a course at the Univ. of Birmingham)  W1 - Tutorial on Java High Level Concurrency Objects (not all details have been mentioned at lesson)  W2 - Online paper for those who want to delve into the "Double-checked locking" trick.  C1/2 - Java code for examples of non-blocking synchronization: Treiber's stack and Michael/Scott's queue  W3 - Online paper on issues in Java benchmarking  C3 - Pseudocode for a Bounded Buffer solution with asynchronous message passing.  W3 - Tutorial on MPI (from Lawrence Livermore National Lab; here, another nice one).  W4 - Tutorial on Java RMI (for "general" distributed objects: Java IDL)  W5 - Tutorial on Java EE - massive official document: only Servlets (no asynch mode), EJBs, and JMS are in our syllabus

 The following web references can be useful for practical programming.


 L1 - NetBeans IDE

 L2 - Eclipse IDE

 L3 - Cheat sheet for JCF

 L4 - MPI home, Open MPI

 L5 - Akka

 L6 - Maven slides and site

 L7 - Slides on the Clojure language - introduction, and concurrency approaches.





The backgroung images for this page have been obtained by reworking the "simple icons" for AWS (http://aws.amazon.com/architecture/icons/).