Programmer’s Interface and Communication Protocol for Remote Procedure Calls

Remote procedure-calls are a useful paradigm for the structuring of distributed computations. Client-processes perform procedure- calls which are executed by server-processes on a possibly different host. Synchronization and data-transfer over a network can be expressed in terms of remote procedure-calls, which provide an inter-process communication facility.In this paper a set of communication primitives are described, which can be embedded into existing sequential programming languages in the form of library routines. These routines allow the programmer to construct distributed applications consisting of programs running on different hosts of a local area network. The communicating programs can be written in different programming languages and can run under different operating systems.An efficient and reliable communication protocol, that directly supports remote procedure-calls, is also described. It is tailored to a hardware environment where messages may be lost but arrive with a high probability at their target.