Sample exam questions.

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An Ontological Representation of the Characteristic Problems of Real-Time Systems

International audienceSoftware Architectural Assessment is becoming a key discipline to identify at early stages of a system synthesis the most important problems that may become relevant in operation. This matter is especially critical for those systems with real-time constraints. Special emphasis shall be made on concurrency issues. Typical RTOS mechanisms supporting concurrency, such as semaphores or monitors, usually lead to execution time penalties hard to identify, reproduce and solve. For this reason it is crucial to understand the root causes of these problems and to provide support to identify and mitigate them at early stages of the system lifecycle. The main objective of this paper is to propose a new classification of the most important problems related to real-time software systems and to provide mechanisms and guidelines to help engineers improve their architectural designs. The taxonomy has been applied to a particular architectural style (UML-PPOOA) and it is used as a reference to create a new assessment module on the PPOOA- Visio CASE tool [15] to support concurrency problems detection

Elements of concurrent programming (Third edition)

These lecture notes are intended to introduce the reader to the basic notions of nondeterministic and concurrent programming. We start by giving the operational semantics of a simple deterministic language and the operational semantics of a simple nondeterministic language based on guarded commands. Then we consider concurrent computations based on: (i) vectorization, (ii) shared variables, and (iii) handshaking communications à la CCS (Calculus for Communicating Systems) [16]. We also address the problem of mutual exclusion and for its solution we analyze various techniques such as those based on semaphores, critical regions, conditional critical regions, and monitors. Finally, we study the problem of detecting distributed termination and the problem of the serializability of database transactions. Sections 1, 2, and 6 are based on [16,22]. The material of Sections 3 and 4 is derived from [1,2,4,5,7,8,13,18,20]. Section 5 is based on [10] and is devoted to programming examples written in Java where the reader may see in action some of the basic techniques described in these lecture notes. In Section 7 we closely follow [3]. We would like to thank Dr. Maurizio Proietti for his many suggestions and his encouragement, Prof. Robin Milner and Prof. Matthew Hennessy for introducing me to CCS, Prof. Vijay K. Garg from whose book [10] I learnt concurrent programming in Java, my colleagues at Roma Tor Vergata University for their support and friendship, and my students for their patience and help. Many thanks also to Dr. Gioacchino Onorati and Lorenzo Costantini of the Aracne Publishing Company for their kind and helpful cooperation. Roma, April 2005 In the third edition we have corrected a few mistakes, we have improved Chapter 2, and we have added in the Appendix a Java program for the distributed computation of spanning trees of undirected graphs. Thanks to Dr. Emanuele De Angelis for discovering an error in the presentation of Peterson’s algorithm. Roma, January 200

5. Process Synchronization

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Synchronization of processes

The study of the synchronization of processes is a very interesting field. It-brings together concepts that have originated in the design of operating systems, and of high level programming languages. Also it is becoming clear that the design of algorithms for parallel execution is intimately connected with synchronization problems. Some specialized synchronization problems have arisen in the design of data base systems. Indeed, distributed data bases provide an example of distributed processing that has immense practical significance. To summarize, synchronization of processes is a universal activity whose importance is being felt throughout computer science. The time has therefore come for the synchronization of processes to be studied as a topic in its own right. In this course I am taking such a broad viewpoint, and am trying to integrate some aspects of operating systems, languages, and parallel algorithms. However, this being a first attempt, the integration is not as thorough as I would have wished. Also, in the short time at my disposal, I am not able to discuss several very important topics, such as reliability

Modelling and verification of starvation-free mutual exclusion algorithms based on weak semaphores

This paper proposes an original framework for modelling and verification (M&V) of starvation-free mutual exclusion algorithms based on weak semaphores, that are without a built-in waiting-process queue. The goal is to support the implementation of light-weight starvation-free semaphores useful in general concurrent systems including cyber physical systems. The M&V approach depends on UPPAAL. First known weak semaphores are modelled. Then they are exploited for model checking classic algorithms. Known properties are retrieved but subtle new ones are discovered. As part of the developed approach, a new algorithm is proposed which uses two semaphores of the weakest type, N bits (N being the number of processes) and a counter. This algorithm too is proved to be correct