1.1. Inherently concurrent systems

Systems which must respond to, or manage, simultaneous activities in their external environment are inherently concurrent and may broadly be classified as:

  • real-time and embedded systems (special-purpose operating systems);

  • operating systems (OSs);

  • distributed operating systems (the OS components are distributed);

  • database management and transaction processing systems (run above operating systems);

  • distributed, application-level services.

The implementation of a system may be centralized, running on a single computer (which may also be termed a host or node), or may be distributed over a number of computers. The user interface to a system may make its support for concurrent activities explicit.

1.1.1. Real-time ...

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