Concurrency, 1 of 3

This is a web page which is part of a course at MIT. It is a good introduction to the basic idea of and issues with concurrency. It shouldn't take too long to read, but it might take a bit longer to think about.

The "reordering" section uses ideas about threads which you probably won't have seen yet, and it does them in Java. Don't worry too much about this section.

The important ideas to get out of this web page are:

• definition of and basic idea of concurrency, and why it comes up all the time
• the shared memory model for concurrent programming
• interleaving of operations and race conditions (everything about the "shared memory example")
• "Concurrency is Hard to Test and Debug"

All videos in this unit:

• Concurrency #1   ← you are here
• Concurrency #2 (watch by August 2)
• Concurrency #3 (watch by August 2)

All units (so far):

• The unix command line (watch by May 17)
• Software tools (watch by May 17)
• Shell programming (watch most in the week of May 17; one more by July 26)
• The make command
• Introductory C (watch by May 31)
• Introduction to arrays in C (watch by May 31)
• Pointers in C (watch by June 7)
• Files in C (watch by June 14)
• Strings in C (watch by June 14)
• struct (watch by June 7)
• The C declaration syntax (watch by July 5)
• The C pre-processor (watch by July 19)
• Dynamic memory allocation (malloc()) (watch by July 5)
• The unix filesystem (watch by July 5)
• Processes (watch most by July 5)
• Signals (watch by July 12)
• Bitwise operations in C (watch by July 12)
• sockets (optionally watch in August)
• select() (watch by July 19)
• Concurrency   ← you are here

Overall course schedule:

• Course schedule