Summary: Evolving RPC for Active Storage
Muthian Sivathanu, Andrea C. Arpaci­Dusseau, and Remzi H. Arpaci­Dusseau
Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin--Madison
{muthian, dusseau, remzi}@cs.wisc.edu
ABSTRACT
We introduce Scriptable RPC (SRPC), an RPC­based framework
that enables distributed system services to take advantage of ac­
tive components. Technology trends point to a world where each
component in a system (whether disk, network interface, or mem­
ory) has substantial computational capabilities; however, tradi­
tional methods of building distributed services are not designed to
take advantage of these new architectures, mandating wholesale
change of the software base to exploit more powerful hardware.
In contrast, SRPC provides a direct and simple migration path for
traditional services into the active environment.
We demonstrate the power and flexibility of the SRPC framework
through a series of case studies, with a focus on active storage
servers. Specifically, we find three advantages to our approach.
First, SRPC improves the performance of distributed file servers,
reducing latency by combining the execution of operations at the

Source: Arpaci-Dusseau, Andrea - Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin at Madison
Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi - Department of Computer Sciences, Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin at Madison

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences