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<h1 style="vertical-align:middle"><img align="middle" valign="middle" style="vertical-align:middle" border="0" src="../images/CDS.jpg"> Concurrency and Distributed Systems</h1>
      <div>
	
	<p>The language of Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) is a
powerful tool for understanding concurrent behaviour.  It models
parallel execution and inter-process communication, it supports a
practical theory of correctness and refinement, and it is attractive
and intuitive to use in specification.</p>
<h4>Course dates</h4>
<center>
Future courses are expected, but yet to be scheduled.<br>
</center>
<h4>Objectives</h4>
<p>At the end of the course, students will have a deeper understanding
of concurrency.  They will be better equipped to design and develop
distributed systems.</p>
<h4>Contents</h4>
<p><dl>
<dt><span>Events and processes:</span></dt>
<dd>models of concurrency; representing communication and interaction; components and interfaces; behavioural and state-based specification; levels of abstraction.</dd>
<dt><span>Interaction:</span></dt>
<dd>state machines; internal and external choice; nondeterminism; safety and liveness constraints; algebraic properties; traces and refusals; process refinement.</dd>
<dt><span>Concurrency:</span></dt>
<dd>parallel combination; specifying interfaces; static alphabets; refinement in context; dynamic process creation and mobile code.</dd>
<dt><span>Abstraction:</span></dt>
<dd>changing levels of abstraction; mechanisms: interleaving, renaming, and hiding; abstraction and nondeterminism; encapsulation and refinement.</dd>
<dt><span>Communication:</span></dt>
<dd>shared channels; synchronous and asynchronous communication; modelling values and state; input and output; indexing and replication; data independence.</dd>
<dt><span>Sequential composition:</span></dt>
<dd>distributed termination; sequential composition of parallel components; abstract data types; processes and state; polling, interrupts, and timeouts.</dd>
<dt><span>Applications:</span></dt>
<dd>case studies and exercises, including: communication protocols; critical systems; caching algorithms; objects, classes, and threads.</dd>
</dl></p>
<h4>Requirements</h4>
<p><p>There are no prerequisites for this course, although some familiarity with discrete mathematics would be useful: <a href="http://www.softeng.ox.ac.uk/subjects/SEM.html">Software engineering mathematics</a> would be an ideal preparation.</p></p>

	
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