GRPC

Abstract

RPC (Remote Procedure Call) is very popular in distributed application design. However, most existing RPC systems have some defects on parallelism and reliability and transparency, they can only support point-to-point and(or) broadcast communication. We try to bring the process group concept into RPC systems and present a new kind of communication cooperation mechanism supporting the cooperation among distributed entities in distributed systems. We call it GRPC(Group Remote Procedure Call) mechanism. According to different application background, the related GRPC mechanism are named lookup, function-convergence and update GRPC. The prototype systems of these three specific classes of GRPC mechanisms have been implemented in the local area network which consists of SUN 4 workstations. The performance evaluation on these prototype systems has been made. Practice has shown: the GRPC mechanism can not only improve the parallelism, reliability and transparency of RPC systems, but also enable RPC systems to support group communication.