A Fault-Tolerant Remote Procedure Call System for Open Distributed Processing

Abstract

This paper is concerned mainly with the software aspects of achieving reliable operations on an open distributed processing environment. A system for supporting fault-tolerant and cross-transport protocol distributed software development is described. The fault-tolerant technique used is a variation of the recovery blocks and the distributed computing model used is the remote procedure call (RPC) model. The system incorporates fault tolerance features and cross-transport protocol communication features into the RPC system and makes them transparent to users. Our system is small, simple, easy to use and also has the advantage of producing server and client driver programs and finally executable programs directly from the server definition files.