Concurrency 101 for all

Concurrency has always been one of the major themes in any introductory Operating Systems course. In the past that was probably the only place it would have been covered in any detail in a typical Computer Science curriculum and there it would also primarily have dealt with concurrent processes. Even there, it was often easier to preach concurrency than it was to practice it. That has now changed quite markedly with the introduction of lightweight processes or threads and support for them in modern programming languages like Java. The average programmer can now easily practice concurrency. More importantly, the recent arrival of multi-core processors on the desktop may make it imperative that the average programmer practice concurrency. Unfortunately while the tools for practicing concurrency may have improved, concurrency remains difficult to get right. This tutorial paper will introduce the topic and then hint at how Java has made it easier to practice. An associated tutorial paper will provide the details and a discussion of a simple, real world bounded buffer example associated with a simple Voice Over IP application