Visualizing Classic Synchronization Problems

Classic synchronization problems are often used to introduce students to the subtleties of concurrency and synchronization mechanisms, such as semaphores, monitors, locks, and condition variables. The Dining Philosophers, Producers-Consumers, and Readers-Writers are all classic problems in which a correct solution requires the actions of multiple processes or threads to be synchronized. In this work, we present visualizations for these three problems and demonstrate their use in helping students build accurate mental models of concurrency abstractions. We also present the results of an experiment that indicate students find using these visualizations to be significantly more engaging than reading a textbook, with no significant difference in learning.