HW1 ASC Report

Organization

Assignment 1 involves implementing a Marketplace that models the Multiple Producers - Multiple Consumers problem:

• Producers offer products for sale
• Consumers purchase available products
• Consumers can become producers by removing products from their shopping cart

The implementation utilizes multiple execution threads accessing shared resources, addressing a problem in the domain of Parallel Computing and Multithreading.

Implementation

The Consumer Class

• Models the consumer thread
• Uses a cart ID (represented as a list)
• Can add or remove products using a dictionary of functions
• Calls place_order() to empty the shopping cart when all operations are complete
• Waits for a specified time if an operation fails
• Thread execution ends when product ordering is activated

The Producer Class

• Models the producer thread
• Publishes products through the Marketplace
• Receives a list of products to iterate infinitely
• Waits for a specified time after successful publishing
• Waits for a creation-time specified duration if publishing fails

The Marketplace Class

• Central point of implementation
• Acts as a facade for synchronizing and communicating between threads
• Provides methods called by both consumers and producers
• Maintains:
  • A list of available products
  • A dictionary mapping cart IDs to product lists
  • A dictionary mapping products to their producers (used when consumers remove products from their cart)
  • A dictionary tracking the maximum number of products a producer can publish

Thread Safety and Synchronization

• Non-thread-safe operations (e.g., increments, decrements) are protected using Locks
• The publish(), add_to_cart(), and remove_from_cart() functions modify producer queue capacities

Order Placement

• When an order is placed, all products in the cart are displayed to the output stream
• The cart (modeled as a list) is then returned to the consumer

Resources Used

1. Python Logging Documentation
2. Python RotatingFileHandler Documentation
3. Python Logging HOWTO