Smart remote procedure calls: transparent treatment of remote pointers

Remote procedure call (RPC) systems have been proven to be a practical basis for building distributed applications. The RPC technique abstracts a typical communication pattern to an ordinary procedure call. Compared with an ordinary procedure call, however, the conventional RPC technique has one evident restriction; pointers (addresses) cannot be passed to remote procedures without the explicit and nontrivial programming effort. This paper presents a method that eliminates this restriction. The method enables transparent treatment of pointers in RPC by combining three key techniques: virtual memory manipulation, pointer swizzling, and coherency protocol. The experiments performed using an implementation of the method show that the method provides performance that is scalable to the access ratio of the remotely referenced data