Operating Systems: Concurrent and Distributed Software Design

1.2. Supporting potentially concurrent applications

We now move from systems which are inherently concurrent to applications which might benefit from concurrent implementation. Parallel algorithms are not presented in detail. Rather, the aim is to show the requirements for operating system support of separate but related concurrent activities that will work together to achieve some result. It is also important to investigate the requirement for some degree of interaction between the parallel computations.

The general motivation for exploiting potential concurrency in an application is that some or all of the following are the case:

• there is a large amount of computing to be done;

• there is a large amount of data to be processed;

• there is a real-time ...