This book is devoted to the most difficult part of concurrent programming, namely synchronization concepts, techniques and principles when the cooperating entities are asynchronous, communicate through a shared memory, and may experience failures. Synchronization is no longer a set of tricks but, due to research results in recent decades, it relies today on sane scientific foundations as explained in this book. In this book the author explains synchronization and the implementation of concurrent objects, presenting in a uniform and comprehensive way the major theoretical and practical results of the past 30 years. Among the key features of the book are a new look at lock-based synchronization (mutual exclusion, semaphores, monitors, path expressions); an introduction to the atomicity consistency criterion and its properties and a specific chapter on transactional memory; an introduction to mutex-freedom and associated progress conditions such as obstruction-freedom and wait-freedom; a presentation of Lamport's hierarchy of safe, regular and atomic registers and associated wait-free constructions; a description of numerous wait-free constructions of concurrent objects (queues, stacks, weak counters, snapshot objects, renaming objects, etc.); a presentation of the computability power of concurrent objects including the notions of universal construction, consensus number and the associated Herlihy's hierarchy; and a survey of failure detector-based constructions of consensus objects. The book is suitable for advanced undergraduate students and graduate students in computer science or computer engineering, graduate students in mathematics interested in the foundations of process synchronization, and practitioners and engineers who need to produce correct concurrent software. The reader should have a basic knowledge of algorithms and operating systems.

The first textbook that focuses purely on Synchronization - a fundamental challenge in Computer Science that is fast becoming a major performance and design issue for concurrent programming on modern architectures, and for the design of distributed systems.

If you're looking to take full advantage of multi-core processors with concurrent programming, this practical book provides the knowledge and hands-on experience you need. The Art of Concurrency is one of the few resources to focus on implementing algorithms in the shared-memory model of multi-core processors, rather than just theoretical models or distributed-memory architectures. The book provides detailed explanations and usable samples to help you transform algorithms from serial to parallel code, along with advice and analysis for avoiding mistakes that programmers typically make when first attempting these computations. Written by an Intel engineer with over two decades of parallel and concurrent programming experience, this book will help you: Understand parallelism and concurrency Explore differences between programming for shared-memory and distributed-memory Learn guidelines for designing multithreaded applications, including testing and tuning Discover how to make best use of different threading libraries, including Windows threads, POSIX threads, OpenMP, and Intel Threading Building Blocks Explore how to implement concurrent algorithms that involve sorting, searching, graphs, and other practical computations The Art of Concurrency shows you how to keep algorithms scalable to take advantage of new processors with even more cores. For developing parallel code algorithms for concurrent programming, this book is a must.

This practical book includes a tutorial of the entire set of Windows and .NET APIs required to write concurrent programs. Because so much of the threading and synchronization features of the platform are Windows-general, the author, Joe Duffy, focuses first on the general behavior and then on the API details of native and managed code. Interspersed among the tutorial are many difficult-to-discover, useful insights, and internal details about how things work.

This book describes the theory, algorithms, and practical implementation techniques behind transaction processing in information technology systems.

This book is a celebration of Leslie Lamport's work on concurrency, interwoven in four-and-a-half decades of an evolving industry: from the introduction of the first personal computer to an era when parallel and distributed multiprocessors are abundant. His works lay formal foundations for concurrent computations executed by interconnected computers. Some of the algorithms have become standard engineering practice for fault tolerant distributed computing – distributed systems that continue to function correctly despite failures of individual components. He also developed a substantial body of work on the formal specification and verification of concurrent systems, and has contributed to the development of automated tools applying these methods. Part I consists of technical chapters of the book and a biography. The technical chapters of this book present a retrospective on Lamport's original ideas from experts in the field. Through this lens, it portrays their long-lasting impact. The chapters cover timeless notions Lamport introduced: the Bakery algorithm, atomic shared registers and sequential consistency; causality and logical time; Byzantine Agreement; state machine replication and Paxos; temporal logic of actions (TLA). The professional biography tells of Lamport's career, providing the context in which his work arose and broke new grounds, and discusses LaTeX – perhaps Lamport’s most influential contribution outside the field of concurrency. This chapter gives a voice to the people behind the achievements, notably Lamport himself, and additionally the colleagues around him, who inspired, collaborated, and helped him drive worldwide impact. Part II consists of a selection of Leslie Lamport's most influential papers. This book touches on a lifetime of contributions by Leslie Lamport to the field of concurrency and on the extensive influence he had on people working in the field. It will be of value to historians of science, and to researchers and students who work in the area of concurrency and who are interested to read about the work of one of the most influential researchers in this field.