Asynchronous remote operation execution in distributed systems

Abstract

The authors present the design and implementation of an asynchronous remote operation execution facility, futures, that retains the benefits of the remote procedure call (RPC) abstraction but allows execution to proceed locally in parallel with remote execution and provides extensive support for managing replies. It is shown how this facility can be easily used to support many common interprocess communication styles, including RPC, multicast, broadcast, returning incremental results, and the multiplexing of multiple remote computations. A flow control mechanism for futures is described.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>