F29OC - Operating Systems & Concurrency

Course leader(s):

Michael John Chantler (Edinburgh, January)
Hani Ragab Hassen (Dubai, January)
To be announced (Dubai, January)
Timothy Tzen Vun Yap (Malaysia, January)

Aims

For the Operating system part: To provide an introduction to operating systems, and their basic principles.

For the Concurrency part: To introduce the theory and practice of concurrent software systems.

Syllabus

1. Operating systems: Overview (1.1 1. OS concepts, types and structures)
2. Operating systems: Abstractions (2.1 1. processes & threads, , 2.2 2. files, and address space.)
3. Operating Systems: Resource Management (3.1 1. CPU scheduling, , 3.2 2. memory management and , 3.3 3. disk management)
4. Concurrency: Parallelism and Concurrency (4.1 1. multi-core systems, , 4.2 2. threads, , 4.3 3.parallelism vs concurrency)
5. Concurrency: Inter-thread comms and mutual exclusion (5.1 1. Critical regions, 5.2 2. Signal/wait synchronisation)
6. Concurrency: Patterns and Mechanisms (6.1 1. monitors, , 6.2 2. semaphores, and , 6.3 3. atomic variables)
Learning outcomes
By the end of the course, students should be able to do the following:

choose suitable operating systems for the different use cases.

choose process scheduling algorithms suitable for specific needs from real-life scenarios.

show how memory and file management work in modern operating systems.

analyse algorithms covering different parts of the operating system functionalities and appraise them.

apply concurrency concepts to optimise algorithms.

compare different concurrency mechanisms and choose suitable ones for different situations.

develop concurrency-proof algorithms.

Further details
Curriculum explorer: Click here
SCQF Level: 9
Credits: 15