This lecture covers the basics of atomic operations in concurrency and parallelism, focusing on hardware-provided atomic operations, synchronized algorithms like test-and-set and ticket lock, readers-writer lock, and concurrent data structures such as queue and stack. It explains the concept of atomic operations from a hardware perspective, types of synchronization mechanisms, and the use of atomic variables in JVM. The lecture also discusses important methods for atomic variables, implementing unique IDs using atomic variables, and using compare and set (CAS) for unique IDs. It concludes with an execution diagram illustrating the process of atomic operations with and without retries.