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++.

-  Extra oral exam, only for students entitled, on April 6th, 2017 h. 3:00pm aula A22. Students willing to sign up for the exam are solicited to do so on the official portal https://esami.unipi.it.

-  Dates for oral exams in the 2017 Winter Session - Students are required to register through the Exam Sign-in Portal at least two days before the exam date.

1st oral exam	2nd oral exam	3rd oral exam	September oral exam
Thu 12/06/2017 B24, h.14:30	Wed 01/02/2017   Mon 06/02/2017 B24, h.14:30   ADII1, h.9:00	Mon 20/02/2017 B24, h.14:30	Tue 12/09/2017 B24 h.14:30

 

First lecture on Mon. Sep. 26th, 2016

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 before the oral exam
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) - CW06 (RMI example) - CW07 (basic use of Servlets) - CW08 (use of stateless/stateful session EJBs)

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)  C1/2 - Java code for examples of non-blocking synchronization: Treiber's stack and Michael/Scott's queue  W2 - 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)  S6 - Slides (commercial-style presentation) on Akka and the related Actor model.)  S7 - Slides for the Seminar by prof. T.Cucinotta on Fault Tolerance in Cloud Computing.

 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

 L5 - Maven slides and site






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