Study Guide for Exam 2

Topics include class & reading assignments from start of Week 4 thru end of Week 7:

• Locks and Semaphores
• Intrinsic vs Explicit Locking
• Fair vs Unfair Locking
• Levels of Locking - read, write...
• Actors:
• Basic capabilities, compare to traditional synchronization/locking
• synchronous vs asynchronous messaging
• Untyped vs Typed Actors
• Designing Actor-based Applications (expect a design problem using the Actor design notation we have been using)
• Software Transactional Memory (STM)
• Fundamental transaction properties (ACID)
• STM concepts : identifiers vs state/value
• How does STM protect shared mutable resources in a multi-threaded application?
• STM relationship to "crossing the memory barrier" in Java VM
• STM compared to traditional synchronization/locking

You will not be required to write any Java code, but reading short code snippets is fair game.