Question

Objective: The purpose of this programming project is to become familiar with synchronization of threads using the Pthreads APIs. This can be accomplished by using the Pthreads library available for the Linux environment.

Counting Words in a File Beginning with a Character
For this part, you do not need to write a program. Describe how you can implement a multithreaded program that can find how many words in a file begin with character ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’, and so on. Your approach must include parallelism to receive any credit. The name of the answer file should be counting-words. It should be a PDF or Word document.

Answer 1

A multithreaded program using Pthreads could create 26 threads to count words starting with each letter of the alphabet in parallel, using synchronization mechanisms like mutexes or semaphores for thread safety.

Step-by-step explanation:

To implement a multithreaded program for counting words in a file that begin with specific characters, you can use the Pthreads library in Linux. The program could create 26 threads, each responsible for a different letter of the alphabet. Each thread reads through the file in parallel, counts words starting with its assigned character, and then stores that count in a shared data structure.

Synchronization mechanisms such as mutexes or semaphores must be used to prevent race conditions when threads access the shared data. At the end of the execution, these counts can be combined to get the total number of words starting with each letter.

To ensure thread safety, one might initialize a mutex before thread creation. Threads will then lock the mutex before updating the shared counter and unlock it afterward. Furthermore, one could implement a barrier to make sure all threads have finished processing before the main thread retrieves the final counts and generates the output file counting-words, which should be in PDF or Word document format.