Re: Teaching Concurrency

[bls@cs.purdue.EDU (Brian L. Stuart)]

In article <10330@june.cs.washington.edu> pattis@cs.washington.edu (Richard Pattis) writes:
>
>OK, so this begs the question: what is the "smallest" assignment that can
>use concurrency fruitfully. I would like to teach a bit about tasking in
>one of my classes, but I don't want students to get "wrong" ideas from the
>example I use.  Anyone out there have such an assignment? Is there some prime
>example out there of a good use of multi-tasking that is amenable to
>classroom instruction?
>
>Rich Pattis

Here at Purdue, in CS503 (Operating Systems) we have often given the
dining philosophers problem as a first assignement to teach concurrency.
Here, each philosopher is implemented as a separate task (well process
actually; we are using XINU).  It's a nice little problem that lets
the students get a feel for working with XINU before diving into its
guts.

Brian L. Stuart
Department of Computer Science
Purdue University