15-440 Distributed Systems

Lecture 6 – RPC

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Building up to today

• Few lectures ago: Abstractions for

communication
• example:TCP masks some of the pain of
communicating across unreliable IP
• Last time: Abstractions for computation
Splitting computation
across the network
• We’ve looked at primitives for computation
and for communication.

• Today, we’ll put them together

Key question:

What programming abstractions work well to split

work among multiple networked computers?

(caveat: we’ll be looking at many possible answers to this question...)

Common communication pattern

Client Hey, do something Server

working {

Done/Result
Writing it by hand...

• eg, if you had to write a, say, password cracker

struct foomsg {
u_int32_t len;
}

send_foo(char *contents) {
int msglen = sizeof(struct foomsg) + strlen(contents);
char buf = malloc(msglen);
struct foomsg *fm = (struct foomsg *)buf;
fm->len = htonl(strlen(contents));
memcpy(buf + sizeof(struct foomsg),
contents,
strlen(contents));
write(outsock, buf, msglen);
}

Then wait for response, etc.

Today's Lecture

• RPC overview

• RPC challenges

• RPC other stuff

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RPC

• A type of client/server communication

• Attempts to make remote procedure
calls look like local ones
{ ...
foo()
}
void foo() {
invoke_remote_foo()
figure from Microsoft MSDN }
Go Example

• Need some setup in advance of this but…

// Synchronous call
args := &server.Args{7,8}
var reply int
err = client.Call("Arith.Multiply", args, &reply)
if err != nil {
log.Fatal("arith error:", err)
}
fmt.Printf("Arith: %d*%d=%d", args.A, args.B, reply)

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RPC Goals

• Ease of programming
• Hide complexity
• Automates task of implementing distributed
computation
• Familiar model for programmers (just make a
function call)

Historical note: Seems obvious in retrospect, but RPC was only invented in the ‘80s.
See Birrell & Nelson, “Implementing Remote Procedure Call” ... or
Bruce Nelson, Ph.D. Thesis, Carnegie Mellon University: Remote Procedure Call.,
1981 :)
Remote procedure call

• A remote procedure call makes a call to a remote

service look like a local call
• RPC makes transparent whether server is local or
remote
• RPC allows applications to become distributed
transparently
• RPC makes architecture of remote machine transparent

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But it’s not always simple

• Calling and called procedures run on different

machines, with different address spaces
• And perhaps different environments .. or operating
systems ..
• Must convert to local representation of data
• Machines and network can fail
Stubs: obtaining transparency

• Compiler generates from API stubs for a

procedure on the client and server
• Client stub
• Marshals arguments into machine-independent format
• Sends request to server
• Waits for response
• Unmarshals result and returns to caller
• Server stub
• Unmarshals arguments and builds stack frame
• Calls procedure
• Server stub marshals results and sends reply

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Marshaling and Unmarshaling

• (From example) hotnl() -- “host to network-byte-order,

long”.
• network-byte-order (big-endian) standardized to deal with
cross-platform variance
• Note how we arbitrarily decided to send the string by
sending its length followed by L bytes of the string?
That’s marshalling, too.
• Floating point...
• Nested structures? (Design question for the RPC
system - do you support them?)
• Complex datastructures? (Some RPC systems let
you send lists and maps as first-order objects)
“stubs” and IDLs

• RPC stubs do the work of marshaling and

unmarshaling data
• But how do they know how to do it?
• Typically: Write a description of the function
signature using an IDL -- interface definition
language.
• Lots of these. Some look like C, some look like XML, ...
details don’t matter much.
Remote Procedure Calls (1)

• A remote procedure call occurs in the following steps:

1. The client procedure calls the client stub in the normal

way.
2. The client stub builds a message and calls the local
operating system.
3. The client’s OS sends the message to the remote OS.
4. The remote OS gives the message to the server stub.
5. The server stub unpacks the parameters and calls the
server.

Continued …

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Remote Procedure Calls (2)

• A remote procedure call occurs in the following steps

(continued):

6. The server does the work and returns the result to the
stub.
7. The server stub packs it in a message and calls its
local OS.
8. The server’s OS sends the message to the client’s
OS.
9. The client’s OS gives the message to the client stub.
10.The stub unpacks the result and returns to the client.

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Passing Value Parameters (1)

• The steps involved in a doing a

remote computation through RPC.
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Passing Value Parameters (2)

a) Original message on x86

b) The message after receipt on the SPARC
c) The message after being inverted. The little numbers in
boxes indicate the address of each byte
Passing Reference Parameters

• Replace with pass by copy/restore

• Need to know size of data to copy
• Difficult in some programming languages

• Solves the problem only partially

• What about data structures containing pointers?
• Access to memory in general?

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Today's Lecture

• RPC overview

• RPC challenges

• RPC other stuff

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RPC vs. LPC

• 4 properties of distributed computing that make

achieving transparency difficult:
• Partial failures
• Latency
• Memory access

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RPC failures

• Request from cli  srv lost

• Reply from srv  cli lost
• Server crashes after receiving request
• Client crashes after sending request
Partial failures

• In local computing:
• if machine fails, application fails
• In distributed computing:
• if a machine fails, part of application fails
• one cannot tell the difference between a machine failure
and network failure
• How to make partial failures transparent to client?

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Strawman solution

• Make remote behavior identical to local behavior:

• Every partial failure results in complete failure
• You abort and reboot the whole system
• You wait patiently until system is repaired
• Problems with this solution:
• Many catastrophic failures
• Clients block for long periods
• System might not be able to recover

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Real solution: break transparency

• Possible semantics for RPC:

• Exactly-once
• Impossible in practice
• At least once:
• Only for idempotent operations
• At most once
• Zero, don’t know, or once
• Zero or once
• Transactional semantics

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Real solution: break transparency

• At-least-once: Just keep retrying on client side until you get a

response.
• Server just processes requests as normal, doesn’t remember
anything. Simple!
• At-most-once: Server might get same request twice...
• Must re-send previous reply and not process request (implies:
keep cache of handled requests/responses)
• Must be able to identify requests
• Strawman: remember all RPC IDs handled. -> Ugh! Requires
infinite memory.
• Real: Keep sliding window of valid RPC IDs, have client number
them sequentially.
Exactly-Once?

• Sorry - no can do in general.

• Imagine that message triggers an external
physical thing (say, a robot fires a nerf dart at
the professor)
• The robot could crash immediately before or
after firing and lose its state. Don’t know
which one happened. Can, however, make
this window very small.
Implementation Concerns

• As a general library, performance is often a big

concern for RPC systems
• Major source of overhead: copies and
marshaling/unmarshaling overhead
• Zero-copy tricks:
• Representation: Send on the wire in native format and
indicate that format with a bit/byte beforehand. What
does this do? Think about sending uint32 between two
little-endian machines
• Scatter-gather writes (writev() and friends)
Dealing with Environmental Differences

• If my function does: read(foo, ...)

• Can I make it look like it was really a local
procedure call??
• Maybe!
• Distributed filesystem...
• But what about address space?
• This is called distributed shared memory
• People have kind of given up on it - it turns out often
better to admit that you’re doing things remotely
Summary:
expose remoteness to client
• Expose RPC properties to client, since you cannot
hide them

• Application writers have to decide how to deal

with partial failures
• Consider: E-commerce application vs. game

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Important Lessons

• Procedure calls
• Simple way to pass control and data
• Elegant transparent way to distribute application
• Not only way…

• Hard to provide true transparency

• Failures
• Performance
• Memory access
• Etc.

• How to deal with hard problem  give up and let

programmer deal with it
• “Worse is better”

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Today's Lecture

• RPC overview

• RPC challenges

• RPC other stuff

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Asynchronous RPC (1)

• The interaction between client and

server in a traditional RPC.

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Asynchronous RPC (2)

• The interaction using asynchronous RPC.

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Asynchronous RPC (3)

• A client and server interacting through

two asynchronous RPCs.
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Go Example

// Asynchronous call
quotient := new(Quotient)
divCall := client.Go("Arith.Divide", args, quotient, nil)
replyCall := <-divCall.Done // will be equal to divCall
// check errors, print, etc.

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Using RPC

• How about a distributed bitcoin miner. Similar to that of

Project 1, but designed to use RPC

• Three classes of agents:

1. Request client. Submits cracking request to server. Waits until
server responds.

2. Worker. Initially a client. Sends join request to server. Now it

should reverse role & become a server. Then it can receive
requests from main server to attempt cracking over limited range.

3. Server. Orchestrates whole thing. Maintains collection of

workers. When receive request from client, split into smaller jobs
over limited ranges. Farm these out to workers. When finds
bitcoin, or exhausts complete range, respond to request client.

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Using RPC

• RequestServerResponse: Classic synchronous

RPC

• Worker-->Server.
• Synch RPC, but no return value.
• "I'm a worker and I'm listening for you on host XXX, port
YYY."

• Server-->Worker.
• Synch RPC? No that would be a bad idea. Better be
Asynch.
• Otherwise, it would have to block while worker does its work,
which misses the whole point of having many workers.

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Binding a Client to a Server

• Registration of a server makes it possible for a client

to locate the server and bind to it
• Server location is done in two steps:
• Locate the server’s machine.
• Locate the server on that machine.

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Example Marshaling Format: JSON

• Data structures declared as:

// Linked list element

type BufEle struct {
Val interface{}
Next *BufEle
}

type Buf struct {

Head *BufEle // Oldest element
tail *BufEle // Most recently inserted element
cnt int // Number of elements in list
}

• (Note that only upper case names get marshaled.)

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Example Marshaling Format: JSON

• Add method to bufi:

func (bp *Buf) String() string {

b, e := json.MarshalIndent(*bp, "", " ")
if e != nil {
return e.Error()
}
return string(b)
}

• Empty buffer

{
"Head": null
}

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Example Marshaling Format: JSON

•After inserting "pig", "cat", "dog":

{
"Head": {
"Val": "pig",
"Next": {
"Val": "cat",
"Next": {
"Val": "dog",
"Next": null
}
}
}
}
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Two styles of RPC implementation

• Shallow integration. Must use lots of library calls

to set things up:
• How to format data
• Registering which functions are available and how they
are invoked.

• Deep integration.
• Data formatting done based on type declarations
• (Almost) all public methods of object are registered.

• Go is the latter.

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Other RPC systems

• ONC RPC (a.k.a. Sun RPC). Fairly basic. Includes

encoding standard XDR + language for describing data
formats.

• Java RMI (remote method invocation). Very elaborate.

Tries to make it look like can perform arbitrary methods on
remote objects.

• Thrift. Developed at Facebook. Now part of Apache Open

Source. Supports multiple data encodings & transport
mechanisms. Works across multiple languages.

• Avro. Also Apache standard. Created as part of Hadoop

project. Uses JSON. Not as elaborate as Thrift.
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