URPC : A toolkit for prototyping remote procedure calls

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 new RPC systems. It allows programmers to provide high-level implementations of RPC semantics and to customize supporting RPC services, such as stub generation and name service, to match the requirements of different RPC semantics. This approach increases flexibility in constructing new RPC systems and greatly reduces coding effort. In addition, this approach allows application-specific optimization by increasing the semantic content of individual RPC calls through customization, as well as by allowing programmers to import protocol machine implementations. Thus, the generated prototype RPC implementations can perform as fast as native RPCs.