anastacia-canto/philosophers

philosophers

This is a project to learn how to deal with parallelism, multithreads, sharing data, executing a unique code in synchronicity without interference between each other.

The context is like the Dining Philosopher Problem:

• One or more philosophers sit at a round table. There is a large bowl of spaghetti in the middle of the table.
• The philosophers alternatively eat, think, or sleep.
• There are also as many forks as philosophers on the table.
• Because serving and eating spaghetti with only one fork is very inconvenient, a philosopher takes their right and their left forks to eat, one in each hand.
• When a philosopher has finished eating, they put their forks back on the table and start sleeping. Once awake, they start thinking again. The simulation stops when a philosopher dies of starvation.
• Every philosopher needs to eat and should never starve.
• Philosophers don't speak with each other.
• Philosophers don't know if another philosopher is about to die.
• No need to say that philosophers should avoid dying!

Usage:

After make, the program needs the following parameters:

• number of philosophers
• time to die: If a philosopher didn't start eating time_to_die milliseconds since the beginning of their last meal or the beginning of the simulation, they die.
• time to eat: The time it takes for a philosopher to eat. During that time, they will need to hold two forks.
• time to sleep
• number of times each philosophers must eat (optional argument): If all philosophers have eaten at least this number times, the simulation stops. If not specified, the simulation stops when a philosopher dies.

./philo [number_of_philosophers] [time_to_die] [time_to_eat] [time_to_sleep] <number_of_times_each_philosopher_must_eat>

Some useful links to learn about threads:

• Unix Threads in C
• Linux Tutorial: POSIX Threads