Concurrency: An Introduction

These flashcards cover key vocabulary terms and concepts related to concurrency and threading, helping students to understand and recall important information for their exam.

Thread

A new abstraction for a single running process, allowing multiple points of execution within a program.

Context Switch

The process of storing the state of a thread so that it can be resumed later, including saving and restoring register states.

Thread Control Block (TCB)

Data structure used by the operating system to store all the information about a thread.

Race Condition

A situation where the outcome of a program depends on the sequence or timing of uncontrollable events, leading to unpredictable results.

Critical Section

Part of a program that accesses a shared resource and must not be executed by more than one thread at a time.

Mutex (Mutual Exclusion)

A synchronization primitive that is used to provide mutual exclusion in concurrent programming.

Condition Variable

A synchronization construct that allows threads to wait until a particular condition occurs.

Atomic Operation

An operation that completes in a single step relative to other threads; it is indivisible and uninterruptible.

Pthread

POSIX standard for threading, providing a set of APIs for managing threads in C/C++.

Blocking

A state where a thread is waiting and cannot proceed until certain conditions are met.

Parallelism

The simultaneous execution of multiple threads to improve performance and resource utilization.

Spin Lock

A locking mechanism where a thread continuously checks for a lock to become available.

Futex

Fast user-space lock mechanism used in Linux, allowing threads to sleep and wake efficiently.

Two-Phase Lock

A locking mechanism that includes a spinning phase followed by a sleeping phase if the lock is not acquired.

Thread Creation

The process of starting a new thread of execution in a program.

Join Operation

A method used to wait for a specific thread to complete its execution.