CS342 Project 3: Synchronization, Mutex and Condition Variables

Description

Objective: Practicing synchronization, mutex and condition variables, multithreaded
programming with Pthreads (POSIX threads), performing experiments and collecting
measurement data, applying Probability and Statistics knowledge.
In this project, you will write a program that will implement a deadlock-free
solution with maximum concurrency for the dining philosopher problem. The
program will work for any odd number of philosophers. The maximum number of
philosophers can be 27. Each philosopher will be represented by a thread in your
program. The main thread will create these threads. The main thread will not be a
philosopher. You will use Pthreads library. You will use Pthread mutex and condition
variables to synchonize. You can adapt the monitor based solution given in the
textbook, that is deadlock free. There are also solutions using semaphores that are
deadlock free. You can adapt such a solution as well. The program will be called
phil and will take the following arguments.
phil
Here, is the minimum think time for a philosopher, is
the maximum think time; is the minimum eating time, is the
maximum eating time. The unit is milisecond. The max value of these parameters can
be 60 seconds. The minimum value of these parameters can be 1 ms. can be
one of “uniform”, “exponential”, or “stdnormal”. The mean parameters for
exponential and standard normal distributions will be (minthink+maxthink)/2 or
(mineat+maxeat)/2. The think time and eat time for a philosopher will be selected
randomly according to the specified distribution and the related mean value. Each
philosopher will eat times. After all philosophers eat count times, the
program will terminate.
An example invocation of the program can be:
phil 500 1000 50 100 exponential 100
Report: Write a report that describes your solution. Write also how you generated
the random values. Try to measure the duration of HUNGRY state for each
philosopher. At the end, for each philosopher, find out the avg hungry duration and
the standard deviation of hungry duration.
You will submit through Moodle. Submit: Makefile, phil.c, README.txt, report.pdf.
Submission procedure is the same with the previous projects.
Clarifications:
• You need to learn how to use Pthreads mutex and condition variables. There
are links to some resources in the References section of the course webpage.
You can find additional resources from Internet.
• The project will be done individually.