A client-server based application using ASTRA—an asynchronous remote procedure call (RPC) mechanism

Abstract

Remote Procedure Call (RPC) has become a popular paradigm for distributed application development in a client-server environment. It is simple, flexible and powerful. Most of the RPC mechanisms today are synchronous in nature, and hence fail to exploit fully the parallelism inherent in distributed applications. The authors have designed and implemented a transport independent asynchronous RPC mechanism (ASTRA) that combines the advantages of both RPC and the message-passing IPC. ASTRA calls do not block the caller (client) and the replies can be received as and when they are needed, thus allowing the client execution to proceed locally in parallel with the server invocation. All the calls are received and executed by the server in the order called by the client. ASTRA is unique among other asynchronous RPC systems in allowing its users to explicitly specify whether low-latency or high-throughput is required for a call. This paper describes the ASTRA primitives and a client-server based application developed using ASTRA. The performance results of the application are briefly summarized to show the suitability of ASTRA for distributed application development.