Description
In this assignment, you are going to implement the Combiner program from Assignment 1 using
multiple threads instead of multiple processes. One difference from Assignment 1 is that the
tuples may not be sorted according to user ids. Your program will use the Pthreads library to
create one thread for the Mapper and multiple threads for the Reducer, where each Reducer
thread handles tuples related to a unique user.
Note that this is an instance of the Producer Consumer problem, where the Mapper thread is
the producer and the Reducer threads are the consumers. You will implement a dynamic data
structure to represent the buffer that enables communication between the mapper and a
reducer. The buffer will have a certain number of slots and each slot in the buffer can hold
exactly one tuple. The size of the buffer will be determined by the command line parameter.
There will be as many buffers as the number of Reducer threads. You should assume that the
Mapper thread will be reading the input from the standard input. So, as an example, your
multithreaded Combiner program will be executed as follows:
$ ./combiner 10 5 < inputFile
where 10 denotes the number of slots in each communication buffer, 5 denotes the number of
users (reducer threads), and inputFile contains the tuples with user actions on specific topics as
it was in Assignment 1. Your code does not need to double check to see if the given number of
reducers is equal to the number of users in the inputFile.
Please make sure that the Mapper thread waits if there are no available slots in the buffer and
the Reducer thread waits if there are no items in the buffer. Also, once the Mapper thread
processes all the tuples (enters them in the communication buffers), it should let the Reducer
threads know that the producer will not be providing any more data. To get full credit, your
solution should be free of race conditions and deadlocks and produce the correct output in
every run of your code. You can use mutexes and condition variables and/or semaphores for
synchronizing your threads. Please submit your files (source, README, and a Makefile) on
CANVAS by the due date.
