MultiRPC: A Parallel Remote Procedure Call Mechanism

摘要

MultiRPC is an invocation mechanism that enables a client to access multiple servers in a single remote procedure call. Parallelism is obtained from concurrency of processing on servers and from the overlapping of retransmissions and timeouts. Each of the parallel calls retains the semantics and functionally of the underlying remote procedure call mechanism. These include secure, authenticated communication and the use of application-specific side effects. The underlying communication medium does not have to support multicast of broadcast transmission. This paper describes the design and evolution of MultiRPC, focusing on the issues of runtime efficiency, versatility, and ease of use. The authors derive an analytic model of the system and present experimental results that validate this model. They also present their observations on using MultiRPC to contact up to 100 servers in parallel. Keywords: UNIX operating system; C programming language.