Remote procedure call

When distributed systems first appeared, they were programmed in traditional sequential languages, usually with the addition of a few library procedures for sending and receiving messages. As distributed applications became more commonplace and more sophisticated, this ad hoc approach became less satisfactory. Researchers all over the world began designing new programming languages specifically for implementing distributed applications. These languages and their history, their underlying principles, their design, and their use are the subject of this paper. We begin by giving our view of what a distributed system is, illustrating with examples to avoid confusion on this important and controversial point. We then describe the three main characteristics that distinguish distributed programming languages from traditional sequential languages, namely, how they deal with parallelism, communication, and partial failures. Finally, we discuss 15 representative distributed languages to give ...

Existing user-level network interfaces deliver high bandwidth, low latency performance to applications, but are typically unable to support diverse styles of communication and are unsuitable for use in multiprogrammed environments. Often this is because the network abstraction is presented at too high a level, and support for synchronisation is inflexible. In this paper we present a new primitive for in-band synchronisation: the Tripwire. Tripwires provide a flexible, efficient and scalable means for synchronisation that is orthogonal to data transfer. We describe the implementation of a non-coherent distributed shared memory network interface, with Tripwires for synchronisation. This interface provides a low-level communications model with gigabit class bandwidth and very low overhead and latency. We show how it supports a variety of communication styles, including remote procedure call, message passing and streaming.

We describe the implementation and performance of an efficient parallel Gauss-Seidel algorithm that has been developed for irregular, sparse matrices from electrical power systems applications. Although, Gauss-Seidel algorithms are inherently sequential, by performing specialized orderings on sparse matrices, it is possible to eliminate much of the data dependencies caused by precedence in the calculations. A two-part matrix ordering technique has been developed—first to partition the matrix into block-diagonal-bordered ...

This paper describes an RFID system mainly comprising an HF-RFID reader with an ethernet-based SOAP extension. SOAP is the abbreviation for Simple Object Access Protocol and provides the user with an easy-to-use alternative for exchanging data with ...

Summary Component-based Software Development is an approach that has many benefits, such as improving application developer productivity, reducing costs and complexity. Programming within this approach is like assembly rather than development, which reduce skill requirements, and allow expertise focus on domain problems. The foundation of any CBSD methodology is its underlying component model, which defines what components are, how they can be constructed, and specifies the standards and conventions that are needed to enable composition of independently developed component. This paper presents a survey of the current available component technologies with focus on the technical perspective of each component model in order to have better understanding for developing a new component model. We have categorized them based on Distributed Application Support and Interaction mechanism.

Many new remote procedure calls (RPC) systems are being built to meet different application requirements, and much development effort has been spent on redoing significant parts of the RPC system. This paper describes URPC, a toolkit for prototyping ...

ABSTRACT Many research efforts have been and are being devoted to the investigation of mobile agents and, more generally, of mobile code. Efficiency, due to reduced network load and usage, is often stated as the principal advantage of these technologies. However, other arguments, such as the need of a careful design stage, are used to emphasize disadvantages of mobile code. In this paper, we investigate mobile code from the design point of view and show how it can be used to solve some typologies of problems in applications distributed over computer networks.

HutBase is a visual design data manager that can be used to store and manipulate data objects created and processed by a variety of design applications. In particular, HutBase allows the user to manipulate the data and start applications, and provides a access mechanism for the applications.HutBase consists of three software layers. The lowest layer, the Object Management System (OMS),

SR is a language for programming distributed systems ranging from operating systems to application programs. On the basis of our experience with the initial version, the language has evolved consider-ably. In this paper we describe the current version of SR and give an overview of its implementation. The main language constructs are still resources and operations. Resources encapsulate processes and variables that they share; operations provide the primary mechanism for process interaction. One way in which SR has changed is that both resources and processes are now created dynamically. Another change is that inheritance is supported. A third change is that the mechanisms for operation invocation-call and send-and operation implementation-proc and in-have been extended and integrated. Consequently, all of local and remote procedure call, rendezvous, dynamic process creation, asynchronous message passing, multicast, and semaphores are supported. We have found this flexibility to be v...

Proxy objects are local representatives of remote objects in a distributed system. We use proxies to construct a transparent application programming interface (API) for the Choices distributed operating system. In earlier work, proxies were used in Choices to provide a protected, object--oriented interface to system objects. The addition of RemoteProxies allows applications to access all resources in a uniform way by simply invoking methods on objects, irrespective of whether they are local, in the kernel, in a different user virtual address space or remote. We also extend proxies as defined by Shapiro[10] to optimize access to remote and protected objects and to provide support for changing server interfaces. We describe a new remote procedure call (RPC) facility for invoking methods on remote objects through the proxy mechanism. The API is made dynamically reconfigurable by using table lookup to perform all functions normally provided by stubs in conventional RPC implementations[1...

In this paper we provide an incremental methodology to assess the effect of the introduction of a dynamic power manager in a mobile embedded computing device. The methodology consists of two phases. In the first phase, we verify whether the introduction of the dynamic power manager alters the functionality of the system. We show that this can be accomplished by employing standard techniques based on equivalence checking for noninterference analysis. In the second phase, we quantify the effectiveness of the ...

R* is an experimental prototype distributed database management system. The computation needed to perform a sequence of multisite user transactions in R* is structured as a tree of processes communicating over virtual circuit communication links. Distributed computation can be supported by providing a server process per site which performs requests on behalf of remote users. Alternatively, a new process could be created to service each incoming request. Instead of using a shared server process or using the process per request approach, R* creates a process associated with the computation of the user on the first request to the remote site. This process is incorporated into the tree of processes serving a single user and is retained for the duration of the user computation. This approach allows R* to factor some of the request execution overhead into the process creation phase, and simplifies the retention of user and transaction context at the multiple sites of the distributed compu...

Abstract: A mobile agent is a program that is not bound to the system on which it began execution, but rather travels amongst the hosts in the network with its code and current execution state (ie Distributed Environment). The implementation of distributed ...

This paper presents aspects of the implementation of a bidirectional link betweenthe Geographic Information System (GIS) ArcView 3.0TMand the interactive dynamicstatistical graphics program XGobi. We describe the main functionality of the link,the underlying Remote Procedure Call (RPC) mechanism, and internal data structures,and discuss topics such as security, concurrency, and linked brushing. We think thatthese topics are of particular interest to

Remote Procedure Call (RPC) is a commonly used mech-anism for clienthewer applications. RPC implements a tightly synchronized clienthewer interaction that is analo-gous to the well understood procedure call in regular non-distributed applications. The ...