MultiKara - Concurrent Programming

MultiKara goes a step further than Kara and offers a playful introduction to the basics of concurrent programming. In MultiKara, you can program up to four ladybugs. Four concurrency mechanisms are at your disposal: two for temporal synchronisation, and two for mutual exclusion. These help you solve many problems where the ladybugs cooperate without interfering with each other.

Program: allkara-en.jar [2004/03/26, 5'000 KB] User's manual: multikara_manual-en.pdf Information and further downloads

Who does MultiKara target?

MultiKara is for pupils and students who already have some programming experience, but are not familiar with concurrent programming. Experience with Kara facilitates the use of MultiKara. Users will soon notice that writing concurrent programs is much harder than writing sequential programs.

Learning Objectives of MultiKara

MultiKara illustrates the basics of concurrent programming and shows the need for concurrency mechanisms which are external to the individual processes. The mechanisms of MultiKara include two standard mechanisms for mutual exclusion, i.e. critical section and monitor, as well as a standard mechanism for temporal synchronization, i.e. the barrier as a special case of the rendezvous. In addition, MultiKara includes a new mechanism called "meeting room" for temporal synchronization.