Abstract
The practicality of Remote Procedure Call(RPC) systems is well recognized and used as the basis for many experimental and commercial distributed systems. However, compared with an ordinary procedure call, conventional RPC systems have a crucial restriction: pointers cannot be used as the arguments of remote procedure without explicit and nontrivial programming efforts. This paper describes the design and implementation of method that eliminates this restriction in current computing environments without extra hardware support. The method enables transparent treatment of pointers in RPC based on caching techniques using shared memory manipulation, pointer swizzling, and coherency protocol. To validate the usefulness of the proposed method, an experimental RPC system was implemented on Linux-based workstations connected to a 10 Mbps Ethernet network. Compared to conventional methods, experiments show that the method provides performance that is proportional to the access ratio of the remotely referenced data.
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© 1997 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Kim, S., Hyun, M., Lee, S. (1997). Transparent treatment of remote pointers using IPC primitive in RPC systems. In: Panda, D.K., Stunkel, C.B. (eds) Communication and Architectural Support for Network-Based Parallel Computing. CANPC 1997. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1199. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-62573-9_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-62573-9_9
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