Client-server computing on Shrimp

Technological advances in network and processor speeds do not lead to equally large improvements in the performance of client-server systems. For instance, hardware performance improvements do not translate into faster user applications. This is primarily because software overhead dominates communication. The Shrimp project at Princeton University seeks solutions to this problem. Shrimp (Scalable High-Performance Really Inexpensive Multiprocessor) supports protected user-level communication between processes by mapping memory pages between virtual address spaces. This virtual memory-mapped network interface has several advantages, including flexible user-level communication and very low overhead for initiating data transfers. Here, we examine two remote procedure call (RPC) protocols and one socket implementation for Shrimp that deliver almost undiminished hardware performance to user applications