March 2003
Intermediate to advanced
912 pages
27h 17m
English
Content preview from Operating Systems: Concurrent and Distributed Software DesignBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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1.4. Defining a concurrent system
The discussion so far has been based on an intuitive notion of what a concurrent system is. We have looked at a number of types of computerized system in which different activities are in the process of being executed (are at some stage between their starting point and finishing point) at the same time, that is, concurrently. System software runs indefinitely and supports a number of applications and/or users. Applications are usually implemented as sequential programs but certain applications may benefit from being implemented as concurrent programs. The concurrency in the application must be supported by the system that runs it.
Figure 1.11 shows some of the concurrent (sub)systems that have been mentioned. ...