Threads primer [Book Reviews]

Abstract

chronous, and unbuffered and buffered, message passing. He upgrades algorithms studied in previous chapters so that mutual exclusion can be enforced on distributed systems. The chapter covers SR send and receive instructions, the powerful SR input (in) statement that implements extended rendezvous with two-way information flow, remote procedure calls, and client/ server programming. Example programs show that the SR runtime system buffers dynamically allocated virtual memory messages that are sent but not yet received, and that the SR runtime system’s process (thread) table is dynamically allocated. This SO-page chapter demonstrates S R s power in the distributed environment, and brings together and greatly augments all that has been learned in Chapters 1 through 5 . The chapter includes a useful summary of SR operations and their invocations, providing a good overview of the language. The chapter concludes with an Xtango color animation of the distributed dining philosophers program presented in The SR Language. The programs in Chapter 7 demonstrate SR’s effectiveness as a language for writing parallel programs that perform numerically intensive computations and that have processes that must synchronize or communicate relatively frequently. The chapter presents coarse-grained parallel SR programs that solve the N Queens problem and the dining philosophers problem on multiple machines. Other programs implement different patterns of communication between collections of processes and provide examples of data parallelism and master-worker organization. The SR language environment contains SRWin, an interface to the X-Windows graphics system. SRWin is a lower-level interface than Xtango is, and might be harder to use. T o complete the book, Hartley has written an SR resource that serves as an interface to Xtango so that its drawing and moving procedures can be called directly from an SR program. He also presents an animatlon of Quicksort using SRWin, so that the reader can compare the difference. Operatzng Systems Programmzng: The SR Language is a carefully and concisely written introduction to concurrent and parallel programming and to the SR language. I have used it successfully in my undergraduate and graduate Operating Systems and Parallel Programming courses for the past year. This unique book works well as the concurrent programming supplement to a standard course text such as Operatzng System Concepts, 4th Ed , by Abraham Silberschatz and Peter Galmn, Addison-Wesley.