This simulator was originally motivated by a paper from the 1989 SIGCSE conference, "Virtual Rings: An introduction to concurrency", Proc. 21st SIGCSE Technical Conference on Computer Science Education, 1989, pp.23-28. by K. Robbins, N. Wagner and D. Wenzel.
The material was developed into a project call The Token Ring
in
The original simulator just handled the case of the ring program and was designed to be used as a classroom demonstration to trace this ring program. It was later expanded to simulate a large variety of programs involving pipes, forks and redirection. I still use it for this purpose but also use it to illustrate the consequences of not being careful about synchronization.
The operating systems course at UTSA is taught with a lecture and a recitation.
The recitation meets for one hour a week.
After the demonstration of the ring in class, the students do spend two recitation sessions with the simulator: to