'The aim of this book is to show both students and practitioners that concurrent and parallel programming does not need to be as hard as it is often portrayed and in fact is often easier than building the equivalent sequential system. This will be achieved by presenting a set of example systems that demonstrate the underlying principles of parallel system design based upon real world examples. Each chapter will discuss the complete implementation of such a system, rather than presenting fragments of solutions. The approach will therefore be founded in principled engineering rather than a detailed exploration of the scientific underpinning. The science has been explored in many books but these have not demonstrated the engineering aspects of actually designing and building parallel systems.
For the purposes of this book; Concurrent means a system built from a set of processes that execute on a single processor. Parallel means that more than one processor is used to execute the processes and these communicate over some form of network. Within a parallel system it is likely that some of the processors will run some processes concurrently.
The book will use as its underpinning parallel environment a package called JCSP (Communicating Sequential Processes for Java) that is available under the LGPL software licence from the University of Kent, Canterbury UK (Welch, 2002) (Welch, 2013). This package implements the Communicating Sequential Process concepts developed by Professor Hoare some 30 years ago (Hoare, 1978) in a form that makes them easily accessible to the programmer. The book’s emphasis is on the engineering of parallel systems using these well-defined concepts without delving into their detailed theoretical aspects. The JCSP package essentially hides Java’s underlying thread model from the programmer in a manner that allows easy implementation of concurrent and parallel systems. It is immaterial whether a process is executed concurrently or in parallel, the process definition remains the same. The JCSP implementation is essentially a re-implementation of the occam programming language (Inmos Ltd, 1988) developed for the Inmos Transputer. (Wikipedia, 2013).'
