James W. Stamos
Abstract
A new technique for computer-to-computer communication is presented that can increase the performance of distributed systems. This technique, called remote evaluation, lets one computer send another computer a request in the form of a program. A computer that receives such a request executes the program in the request and returns the results to the sending computer. Remote evaluation provides a new degree of flexibility in the design of distributed systems. In present distributed systems that use remote procedure calls, server computers are designed to offer a fixed set of services. In a system that uses remote evaluation, server computers are more properly viewed as programmable processors. One consequence of this flexibility is that remote evaluation can reduce the amount of communication that is required to accomplish a given task. In this paper we discuss the semantics of remote evaluation and its effect on distributed system design. We also summarize our experience with a prototype implementation.
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Index Terms
- Remote evaluation
Recommendations
Implementing Remote Evaluation
Remote evaluation (REV) is a construct for building distributed systems that involves sending executable code from one computer to another computer via a communication network. How REV can reduce communication and improve performance for certain classes ...
Reviews
Robert Bruce McLaughlin
The new concept of distributed processing presented by Stamos and Gifford takes the idea of a remote procedure call (RPC) one step further. A remote evaluator (REV) is a remote server that is sent a program, executes the program, and returns the results to the client. A REV program is allowed to contain invocations of programs to run on other servers. The authors are convinced that this approach will reduce network traffic compared to the conventional RPC. The authors give examples of REV programs, which illustrate the concept. The final section presents results of a simple test of the idea. The authors' recommendation is a variation of a concept that has been in use since the early days of telecomputing. They briefly discuss similar concepts, such as SunDew, CLAM, NCL, and Inter-Lisp-D, and compare them to their proposal. The authors leave the solution of several difficult problems—security, limiting resources consumed by the REV program, and deadlock control—to implementers. The paper does not address questions of resource control and allocation over the whole server network. The paper is for workers interested in distributed processing over a network. As such, the authors expect the reader to understand the technical details of such processing. The paper contains several network distributed processing references, with no apparent bias or omissions.
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