CST334 - Week 5 Reflection

 Weekly Learning Reflection

        This week marked a deep dive into concurrency, parallelism, thread scheduling, critical sections, race conditions, how threads interact with shared memory, and why synchronization is vital in multithreaded programs. One immediate concept that stuck out to me was the dichotomy between concurrency and parallelism. Concurrency and a single CPU handling different processes made sense to me and now I see the power and complexity of parallelism--while concurrency relies on time-sharing/context switching, parallelism executes threads simultaneously across multiple CPU cores. While threads share the same address space, program code, global variables, and heap, each thread actually has its own stack to maintain separate execution states. This allows the threads to run independently while avoiding each other's function calls and local variables. Through utilizing distinct stacks, threads can be created and switched between each other more quickly.

        A concurrency concept that we also drilled down into was locking and why it is so crucial. Locks are a synchronization primitive used to control shared resources in a multithreaded environment. Without locks, two threads could update the same variable at the same time and cause data corruption or a crash. Spin locks continuously loop waiting for a lock while ticket locks enforce fairness with a FIFO system. Ticket locks reduce starvation and are more scalable/predictable than spin locks. Mutual exclusion locks, or mutexes, are safer for protecting shared resources. Mutexes allow threads to wait for specific conditions before resuming. A lot of moving (and shared/locking) pieces again this week but overall, my understanding of how modern operating systems handle multitasking has certainly deepened.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Introduction and First Post!

 Greetings! My name is Liam, and I am a Computer Science major. It has been a long road back to university, so I am excited to document this process with CSUMB. The first week has been rife with wiping the dust off of a few common best practices and procedures for writing based assignments and online classes. As someone who has been documenting work processes for multiple industries across a decade, I am brutally in touch with the need for proceduralizing and very appreciative of CSUMB's online learning structure. I have learned from this week's cohort-wide discussion posts that I am working with a wonderful variety of kind and intelligent folks who I am excited to keep learning and collaborating with, many of us seem to be in a similarly unique and formative chapter of our professional lives and that is very special to share. Creating a study schedule and reviewing important paper-writing practices such as properly citing sources has been crucial. While I am anxious to continu...
Read more

Week 2: Learning Strategy Reflections, Time Management Activity Log, Project Management Basics, Previous Capstones That Interest Me, Weekly Reflection

Image
  3 learning strategies I am good at and 3 learning strategies to improve from Dr. Bob Kizlik's Effective Study Skills piece:              Dr. Kizlik's write-up on effective study skills gave me a lot to consider. On one hand, I feel particularly capable of a handful of approaches listed but on the other hand, there are more abstract elements of effective studying that I still need to nail down for myself. As far as more controlled aspects of my personal study culture go, I will say I am great at making a study schedule, gathering the proper materials before writing or working, and making every hour that I am actually studying count.           It's difficult for me to begin working on any project without mapping out the workflow and estimating rough windows of time that each phase of the process might take. I am good at reassessing how I need to use the allotted study or work time as usefully as possible. As ...
Read more

Educational Goals, Career Goals, ETS Comp Sci Test Estimate, and Weekly Reflection

 Part One: Educational Goals By the end of the Computer Science Online program at CSU Monterey Bay, I will have gained a comprehensive, practical understanding of software engineering, specifically focusing on preparing to begin projects regarding the development and implementation of network security and encryption tools. I will achieve this by applying my coursework knowledge to real-world programming challenges, possible internships, and by building a portfolio of projects of all varieties that demonstrate my growth in both coding and cybersecurity skills. I will actively pursue certification programs like CEH and CISSP to supplement my academic education and ensure I am industry-ready. I don't regard this as Plan A, but if AI truly does obliterate the computer science job industry, I will need to sharpen my skills and knowledge even further through a Master of Computer Science or Data Science or perhaps even AI or Statistics.  This goal is vivid because it specifi...
Read more