Concurrency & Parallelism

By the end, you can

• Explain the difference between concurrency and parallelism, and give an example of each.
• Describe why threads sharing memory create race conditions, and trace the lost-update problem on an unsynchronized read-modify-write (two threads each read the same counter value, both increment, and one update is overwritten).
• Explain how a mutex provides mutual exclusion over a critical section.
• State the four Coffman conditions and identify which one a specific prevention strategy breaks.
• Distinguish deadlock from livelock and from starvation.
• Describe the roles of the two semaphores and the mutex in the producer–consumer pattern.
• Apply Amdahl's law to calculate the maximum speedup given a serial fraction and a core count.
• Explain why a single-threaded async event loop is concurrent but not parallel.