Linda arouses a Sleeping Barber

Abstract

This paper presents an approach that gives students insights into parallelism and exposure to discrete-event simulation techniques without requiring that they have formal courses in either. I apply the rather curious Linda coordination model to the classic Sleeping Barber Problem used frequently to illustrate inter-process communication activities in operating system courses. Normally, customers seeking haircuts are represented as processes spawned as faceless entities with no regard to inter-arrival times or proper ordering of departures for those who get cuts. This paper uses elementary discrete-event simulation techniques to introduce this sought for realism while preserving the original motivation of using the Sleeping Barber to demonstrate process concurrency.