Implementing Remote Evaluation
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
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A new technique for computer-to-computer communication is presented that can increase the generality and 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 soft abstractions. One consequence of this flexibility is that remote evaluation can reduce the amount of communication that is required to accomplish a given task. Our thesis is that it is possible to design a remote evaluation system that permits the processing of a program to be distributed among remote computers without changing the program''s semantics. In support of this thesis our proposal for remote evaluation uses the same argument passing semantics for local and remote procedure invocations (call by sharing); it provides atomic transactions to mask computer and communication failures; and it provides a static checking framework that identifies procedures that can not be relocated from computer to computer. We discuss both the semantics of remote evaluation and our experience with a prototype implementation. The idea of a remote data type is introduced to let one computer name objects at a remote computer. A detailed discussion of the compile-time and run-time support necessary for remote evaluation is provided, along with a detailed sample application. {AD# A169739}