Sleeping Barber Problem
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Sleeping Barber Problem
In computer science, the sleeping barber problem is a classic inter-process communication and synchronization problem that illustrates the complexities that arise when there are multiple operating system processes. The problem was originally proposed in 1965 by computer science pioneer Edsger Dijkstra, who used it to make the point that general semaphores are often superfluous. Problem statement Imagine a hypothetical barbershop with one barber, one barber chair, and a waiting room with ''n'' chairs (''n'' may be 0) for waiting customers. The following rules apply: * If there are no customers, the barber falls asleep in the chair * A customer must wake the barber if he is asleep * If a customer arrives while the barber is working, the customer leaves if all chairs are occupied and sits in an empty chair if it's available * When the barber finishes a haircut, he inspects the waiting room to see if there are any waiting customers and falls asleep if there are none There are two m ...
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Computer Science
Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical disciplines (including the design and implementation of Computer architecture, hardware and Computer programming, software). Computer science is generally considered an area of research, academic research and distinct from computer programming. Algorithms and data structures are central to computer science. The theory of computation concerns abstract models of computation and general classes of computational problem, problems that can be solved using them. The fields of cryptography and computer security involve studying the means for secure communication and for preventing Vulnerability (computing), security vulnerabilities. Computer graphics (computer science), Computer graphics and computational geometry address the generation of images. Progr ...
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FIFO (computing And Electronics)
Representation of a FIFO queue In computing and in systems theory, FIFO is an acronym for first in, first out (the first in is the first out), a method for organizing the manipulation of a data structure (often, specifically a data buffer) where the oldest (first) entry, or "head" of the queue, is processed first. Such processing is analogous to servicing people in a queue area on a first-come, first-served (FCFS) basis, i.e. in the same sequence in which they arrive at the queue's tail. FCFS is also the jargon term for the FIFO operating system scheduling algorithm, which gives every process central processing unit (CPU) time in the order in which it is demanded. FIFO's opposite is LIFO, last-in-first-out, where the youngest entry or "top of the stack" is processed first. A priority queue is neither FIFO or LIFO but may adopt similar behaviour temporarily or by default. Queueing theory encompasses these methods for processing data structures, as well as interactions between s ...
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Concurrency (computer Science)
In computer science, concurrency is the ability of different parts or units of a program, algorithm, or problem to be executed out-of-order or in partial order, without affecting the outcome. This allows for parallel execution of the concurrent units, which can significantly improve overall speed of the execution in multi-processor and multi-core systems. In more technical terms, concurrency refers to the decomposability of a program, algorithm, or problem into order-independent or partially-ordered components or units of computation. According to Rob Pike, concurrency is the composition of independently executing computations, and concurrency is not parallelism: concurrency is about dealing with lots of things at once but parallelism is about doing lots of things at once. Concurrency is about structure, parallelism is about execution, concurrency provides a way to structure a solution to solve a problem that may (but not necessarily) be parallelizable. A number of mathema ...
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Readers–writers Problem
In computer science, the readers–writers problems are examples of a common computing problem in concurrency. There are at least three variations of the problems, which deal with situations in which many concurrent threads of execution try to access the same shared resource at one time. Some threads may read and some may write, with the constraint that no thread may access the shared resource for either reading or writing while another thread is in the act of writing to it. (In particular, we want to prevent more than one thread modifying the shared resource simultaneously and allow for two or more readers to access the shared resource at the same time). A readers–writer lock is a data structure that solves one or more of the readers–writers problems. The basic reader–writers problem was first formulated and solved by Courtois ''et al.'' First readers–writers problem Suppose we have a shared memory area (critical section) with the basic constraints detailed above. It ...
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Cigarette Smokers Problem
The cigarette smokers problem is a concurrency problem in computer science, originally described in 1971 by Suhas Patil. The problem has been criticized for having "restrictions which cannot be justified by practical considerations." Problem description Patil's problem includes a "quite arbitrary" "restriction that the process which supplies the ingredients cannot be changed and that no conditional statements may be used." Assume a cigarette requires three ingredients to make and smoke: tobacco, paper, and matches. There are three smokers around a table, each of whom has an infinite supply of ''one'' of the three ingredients — one smoker has an infinite supply of tobacco, another has paper, and the third has matches. There is also a non-smoking agent who enables the smokers to make their cigarettes by arbitrarily ( non-deterministically) selecting two of the supplies to place on the table. The smoker who has the third supply should remove the two items from the table, us ...
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Dining Philosophers Problem
In computer science, the dining philosophers problem is an example problem often used in concurrent algorithm design to illustrate synchronization issues and techniques for resolving them. It was originally formulated in 1965 by Edsger Dijkstra as a student exam exercise, presented in terms of computers competing for access to tape drive peripherals. Soon after, Tony Hoare gave the problem its present form. Problem statement Five philosophers dine together at the same table. Each philosopher has their own place at the table. There is a fork between each plate. The dish served is a kind of spaghetti which has to be eaten with two forks. Each philosopher can only alternately think and eat. Moreover, a philosopher can only eat their spaghetti when they have both a left and right fork. Thus two forks will only be available when their two nearest neighbors are thinking, not eating. After an individual philosopher finishes eating, they will put down both forks. The problem is how to ...
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C (programming Language)
C (''pronounced like the letter c'') is a General-purpose language, general-purpose computer programming language. It was created in the 1970s by Dennis Ritchie, and remains very widely used and influential. By design, C's features cleanly reflect the capabilities of the targeted CPUs. It has found lasting use in operating systems, device drivers, protocol stacks, though decreasingly for application software. C is commonly used on computer architectures that range from the largest supercomputers to the smallest microcontrollers and embedded systems. A successor to the programming language B (programming language), B, C was originally developed at Bell Labs by Ritchie between 1972 and 1973 to construct utilities running on Unix. It was applied to re-implementing the kernel of the Unix operating system. During the 1980s, C gradually gained popularity. It has become one of the measuring programming language popularity, most widely used programming languages, with C compilers avail ...
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Semaphore (programming)
In computer science, a semaphore is a variable or abstract data type used to control access to a common resource by multiple threads and avoid critical section problems in a concurrent system such as a multitasking operating system. Semaphores are a type of synchronization primitive. A trivial semaphore is a plain variable that is changed (for example, incremented or decremented, or toggled) depending on programmer-defined conditions. A useful way to think of a semaphore as used in a real-world system is as a record of how many units of a particular resource are available, coupled with operations to adjust that record ''safely'' (i.e., to avoid race conditions) as units are acquired or become free, and, if necessary, wait until a unit of the resource becomes available. Semaphores are a useful tool in the prevention of race conditions; however, their use is not a guarantee that a program is free from these problems. Semaphores which allow an arbitrary resource count are calle ...
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Queue (abstract Data Type)
In computer science, a queue is a collection of entities that are maintained in a sequence and can be modified by the addition of entities at one end of the sequence and the removal of entities from the other end of the sequence. By convention, the end of the sequence at which elements are added is called the back, tail, or rear of the queue, and the end at which elements are removed is called the head or front of the queue, analogously to the words used when people line up to wait for goods or services. The operation of adding an element to the rear of the queue is known as ''enqueue'', and the operation of removing an element from the front is known as ''dequeue''. Other operations may also be allowed, often including a ''peek'' or ''front'' operation that returns the value of the next element to be dequeued without dequeuing it. The operations of a queue make it a first-in-first-out (FIFO) data structure. In a FIFO data structure, the first element added to the queue will b ...
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Resource Starvation
In computer science, resource starvation is a problem encountered in concurrent computing where a process is perpetually denied necessary resources to process its work. Starvation may be caused by errors in a scheduling or mutual exclusion algorithm, but can also be caused by resource leaks, and can be intentionally caused via a denial-of-service attack such as a fork bomb. When starvation is impossible in a concurrent algorithm, the algorithm is called starvation-free, lockout-freed or said to have finite bypass. This property is an instance of liveness, and is one of the two requirements for any mutual exclusion algorithm; the other being correctness. The name "finite bypass" means that any process (concurrent part) of the algorithm is bypassed at most a finite number times before being allowed access to the shared resource. Scheduling Starvation is usually caused by an overly simplistic scheduling algorithm. For example, if a (poorly designed) multi-tasking system always swi ...
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