Week 12

Linda and Tuple Space

Lecture Notes: PDF

Assignment 6
- Due Thu, April 23
- Versions 2 and 3 from slides 11, 12 of PDF
  - (version 1 included in sample code)
  - versions from slides 11 and 12 are the versions to implement
- Extra challenge:
  - version 3 from slide 23
  - run with multiple producers / consumers from the command line
  - Tech notes:
    - to pass a command line parameter into your ruby program (i.e., so each producer/consumer knows its id), use the ARGV array like this:
      id = ARGV[0]
    - then use a for loop from the bash prompt to run multiple producers/consumers:
      $ for i in {1..3} > do ruby producer.rb $i & > done
    - and similarly to launch a different number of consumers
  - Demo: Marc will attempt a live demo running multiple producers and consumers from his version 3 – hope this works!
  - Tech notes 2:
    - alternatively, we could seed TS with producer/consumer id tuples
      - instead of passing in command line arguments via ARGV array
    - then each producer process can ts.take their producer id tuple, and
    - each consumer process can do the same for their consumer id tuple
    - arguably, this is more in the spirit of a Linda/TS program, and less dependent on how different OS's provide support for launching Linda processes with command line arguments.

Discussion: modeling one model of concurrency with another
- shared memory (critical sections, etc.)
- Golang: channels (message passing)
- Ruby/Rinda: Linda and Tuple Space
We don't always get to choose our language/library/stack

Shear Sort (time permitting)
- Lecture notes: PDF