Fast RPC on the SHRIMP Virtual Memory Mapped Network Interface

Abstract:

The emergence of new network interface technology is enabling new approaches to the development of communications software. This paper evaluates the SHRIMP virtual memory mapped network interface by using it to build two fast implementations of remote procedure call (RPC).
Our first implementation, called vRPC, is fully compatible with the SunRPC standard. We change the RPC runtime library; the operating system kernel is unchanged, and only a minimal change was needed in the stub generator to create a new protocol identifier. Despite these restrictions, our vRPC implementation is several times faster than existing SunRPC implementations. A round-trip null RPC with no arguments and results under vRPC takes about 33 microseconds.
Our second implementation, called ShrimpRPC, is not compatible with
SunRPC but offers much better performance.
ShrimpRPC specializes the stub generator and runtime
library to take full advantage of SHRIMP's features.
The result is a round-trip null RPC latency of 9.5
microseconds, which is about one microsecond above
the hardware minimum.

This technical report has been published as

Fast RPC on the SHRIMP Virtual Memory Mapped Network Interface.
Angelos Bilas and Edward W. Felten, IEEE Transactions on Parallel
and Distributed Computing, Feb. 1997.