Concurrent Systems : An Integrated Approach to Operating Systems, Distributed Systems and Databases

This book presents a modern approach to software systems, ideally suited to the needs of today's students and programmers. It focuses on those concepts in concurrency that play a vital role in the design of operating systems, database systems, distributed systems and communication networks.

In the second edition, an object-oriented paradigm is used as a unifying framework, the principles of concurrency are developed from simple uniprocessor systems through to modern multiprocessor systems with shared memory or in distributed enviroments. The evolution of the concepts leads naturally to transactions, concurrency control and recovery for distributed databases.

Contents (Second edition)

Preface to the second edition.

1.. Introduction: Examples and requirements

PART I: BACKGROUND AND FUNDAMENTALS
2. System structure and dynamic execution
3. The hardware interface, I/O and communications
4. Support for processes
5. Fundamentals of distributed systems
6. Memory management
7. File management

PART II: SINGLE CONCURRENT ACTIONS
8. System structure
9. Low-level synchronization primitives: Implementation
10. Low-level primitives: Use in systems and languages
11. Language primitives for shared memory
12. IPC and system structure
13. IPC without shared memory
14. Crash resilience ad persistent data
15. Distributed IPC

PART III: CONCURRENT COMPOSITE ACTIONS
16. Decomposable abstract operations
17. Resource allocation and deadlock
18. Transactions
19. Concurrency control
20. Recovery
21. Logging and shadowing for crash resilience
21. Distributed transactions
22. Distributed computations

PART IV: SYSTEM CASE STUDIES
23. UNIX
24. Microkernels: Mach and CHORUS
25. Windows NT
26. Middleware: CORBA and Java
27. Transaction processing monitors and systems

APPENDIX: EVOLUTION OF COMPUTER SYSTEMS

Bibliography
Glossary
Author index
Subject index

Jean Bacon is Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Cambridge, where she teaches operating systems, distributed systems and computer architecture. Her main research interest is in distributed computing, for which Cambridge is a centre of excellence.