A communication library to support concurrent programming courses

Abstract

A number of communication libraries have been written to support concurrent programming. For a variety of reasons, these libraries generally are not well-suited for use in undergraduate courses. We have written a communication library uniquely tailored to an academic environment. The library provides two levels of communication abstraction (topology and channel) and supports communication among threads, processes on the same machine, and processes on different machines, via a unified interface. The routines facilitate controlled message loss along channels and can be integrated with an existing graphical tool that supports visualization of the communication that occurs. An editor has been developed for automatic code generation for arbitrary topologies via a graphical interface. All these tools run over Solaris, Linux, and Windows.

Channels, visualization, and topology editor

“…Reactions from site testers and participants of our workshops [6] were very positive and encouraging. Based on channels, we are currently developing ConcurrentMentor for data-parallel programming and distributed programming [5]. The interested readers may find more about our work, software availability, course materials, and future announcements at the following site:…”

“…Moreover, the description of the topology is also saved for the visualization to use. Because the definitions of channels are all the same in ThreadMentor and in the parallel and distributed modules that are being developed in our concurrent project [5], mtuTopology can be used for threads as well as for parallel and distributed programming.…”

A three-dimensional visualization of communications in distributed program environments

“…Carr et al [1] implemented a communication library with a visualization for some use in undergraduate courses.…”