The Importance of Safety

095_greg-rosenke-rVBwkuAerGI-unsplash.jpg Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash

It's so easy to get caught up in liveness, that we can forget about safety. Let's take a look at the importance of *not* doing that.

Learning Objectives

We'll learn some more about the importance of using provided synchronization constructs and how to design multithreaded code.

Upon completion of this module, you will be able to:

Learning

This time, we'll do our learning in class!

Recommended Readings

Completing the readings in this class is highly recommended---it can be very helpful to see how the concepts are explained by a different person, and the extra details can help the pieces fit together.

  1. Read the Therac-25 paper, following these tips.
    If you are off-campus, this link through the UT libraries Web proxy may be useful.
  2. Read this New York Times article and at least the first two pages of this one
    (make sure you see the pictures).
    To get access to the online NYT through UT, follow the library's instructions.

Fun Insights

From Class

Evaluating Your Understanding

We are providing these rubrics for each module so that you can better understand what is expected and evaluate your understanding against those expectations. The hope is that, if you find yourself earning a 3 or below, you will continue to enhance your understanding until you find yourself earning a 4 or a 5.

This module is entirely about understanding the importance of safety.