Free book on multitasking

Free book on multitasking

[Bo Sanden]

Title: MULTITHREADING
Version: 0.9 August 2007
Author: Bo Sanden
License: Permission to copy if author, title and version are acknowledged
Copyright 2007 Bo Sanden, Colorado Technical University
Url: http://home.earthlink.net/~bosanden/Multithreading

This book is intended for designers and programmers of multitask 
software. It introduces the tasking/threading support in Ada and Java 
and presents Entity-Life Modeling, which is an intuitive design approach 
for reactive systems.

Reactive systems include those that operate in real time in the widest 
sense, such as embedded control systems as well as telephone switches; 
interactive systems from automated teller machines and gas pumps to 
travel reservation systems; and event-processing systems such as many 
games. ELM also applies to discrete-event simulations based on the 
process interaction worldview. ELM finds multitask solutions to problems 
that are inherently concurrent.

With Entity-life modeling, you pattern tasks on event threads in the 
problem domain much as an object-oriented program is patterned on 
objects in the problem domain. Most examples are in Ada.

Part I: Foundations
1. Introduction
2. Support for multithreading (Ada 2005, Java and Pthreads)
3. State modeling (practical use of state machines)

Part II: Entity-life modeling
4. Entity-life modeling
5. State-machine implementations
6. Resource sharing
7. Simultaneous exclusive access to multiple resources

Part III: Background and discussion
8. Real-time software architectures. Data-flow design approaches
9. The origins of entity-life modeling