Rice Computer Science-Colloquia
Rice University
Department of Computer Science
presents

Gilles Muller

INRIA/IRISA

Fast, Optimized Sun RPC Using Automatic Program Specialization

Abstract

Fast remote procedure call (RPC) is a major concern for distributed systems. Many studies aimed at efficient RPC consist in either new implementations of the RPC paradigm or manual optimization of critical sections of the code. This paper presents an experiment that achieves optimization of an RPC implementation, namely the Sun RPC. The optimized Sun RPC is obtained by using an automatic specializer for C programs, named TEMPO. It runs up to1.5 times faster than the original Sun RPC. In addition, the specialized marshaling process runs up to 3.75 times faster than the original one. Close examination of the specialized code does not reveal further optimizations opportunities which would lead to significant improvements without major manual restructuring.

The contributions of this work are:

  1. the optimized code is safely produced by an automatic tool and thus does not entail any additional maintenance
  2. to the best of our knowledge this is the first successful specialization of mature, commercial, representative system code
  3. the optimized Sun RPC runs significantly faster than the original code.
The talk will be followed by a demonstration of the TEMPO specializer.

Friday, June 6, 1997 @ 4 p.m. in Duncan Hall 1064
Reception after the talk in Duncan Hall 1049