Experimentation with bounded buffer synchronization

  • Authors:

  • Steven Robbins

  • Affiliations:

  • Division of Computer Science, University of Texas at San Antonio

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the thirty-first SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

Undergraduates are usually introduced to synchronization in operating systems through a discussion of classical problems such as reader-writer or producers-consumers. The traditional approach to teaching these topics is not effective in conveying to students how programs with incorrect synchronization actually behave. This paper introduces a simple probabilistic model for synchronization failure and shows how students can empirically study these issues. These activities are supported by a simulator that students can use to explore synchronization in the context of the bounded buffer problem. The simulator is written in Java and can be used either standalone or from a standard browser. Students can save the data and graphs generated by the simulator in a log file in HTML format.