Professional Multicore Programming: Design and Implementation for C++ Developers

Chapter 9. Modeling Software Systems That Require Concurrency

	The topology of perceived interconnected cyberspaces need not have any direct connection to that of the array of support computers, since the cyberspaces are perceived, not actual spaces.
	--Marcus Novak, Liquid Architectures in Cyberspaces

A model of a system is the body of information gathered for the purpose of studying the system so that it can be better understood by the developers and maintainers of the system. When a system is modeled, the boundaries and identification of the entities, attributes, and activities performed by the system can be determined. Modeling is an important tool in the design process of any system. It is essential that developers fully understand the system they are developing. Modeling can reveal the hidden concurrency and opportunities where parallelism can be exploited.

In this chapter, we show you how to visualize and model your concurrent system using the UML. We will discuss diagraming techniques used to visualize and model concurrent systems from three perspectives:

• The structural perspective

• The behavioral perspective

• The architectural perspective

The classes, objects, processes, threads, and systems used as examples in this chapter are used for exposition purposes and may or may not necessarily reflect actual classes, objects, or structures used in an actual system. This chapter should not be considered a primer for UML but rather an introduction to the diagrams used in this book focused ...