Learning Outcomes What you will know

This page collects together all of the “outcomes” associated with individual modules. Outcomes identify what students will know and be able to do if they master the material.

Concurrency

Understand the general concept of concurrency
Understand the process and the thread abstractions
Be able to use threads to implement concurrency in programs
Understand the thread safety issue

Referencing modules: Concurrency, Processes, Threads, Java Threads, Thread Safety, Threads In Other Languages

Assessed by: Homework #2 Assessment, Midterm Exam Assessment

Java Threads

Be proficient in Java multithreaded programming
Be proficient in the use of Java threads in the context of JavaFX GUI development
Be aware of and able to use the java.util.concurrent package

Referencing modules: Java Threads, The Java Concurrency Package

Assessed by: Homework #2 Assessment, Midterm Exam Assessment

Thread Synchronization

Understand synchronization abstractions (locks, condition variables, semaphores, monitors)
Be able to use synchronization abstractions in programs
Be familiar with classical synchronization problems/solutions

Referencing modules: Classic Concurrency Problems, Condition Variables, Locks, No Locks?, Semaphores, Thread Safety, Threads In Other Languages

Assessed by: Homework #6 Assessment, Homework #5 Assessment, Homework #8 Assessment, Homework #3 Assessment, Homework #4 Assessment, Midterm Exam Assessment, Homework #7 Assessment

Data Parallelism

Understand the concept of data parallelism
Understand notions of work-sharing and domain-decomposition
Understand notions of load-balancing
Be able to implement efficient data-parallelism in programs

Referencing modules: Data Parallelism

Assessed by:

Multithreading in C/++ with OpenMP

Understand what abstractions OpenMP provides for concurrency in C/C++
Be proficient in writing OpenMP programs

Referencing modules: Multi-Threading in C/C++

Assessed by: Midterm Exam Assessment

Concurrency and Performance

Understand the notion of parallel speedup, parallel efficiency
Understand the reason for and the implications of Amdahl’s law

Referencing modules: Data Parallelism

Assessed by: Midterm Exam Assessment

Code optimization

Understand how to measure program performance
Be exposed to examples of code optimization techniques
Be aware of what compilers can and cannot optimize
Be expose to correctness bugs caused by aggressive optimization
Understand the challenges and possible solutions when programming for locality

Referencing modules: Programming for Performance

Assessed by:

Concurrency without Locks

Understand the basics of lockfree programming
Understand the concepts behind transactional memory

Referencing modules: No Locks?