SUPRA-RPC: SUbprogram PaRAmeters in Remote Procedure Calls

One of the challenges in RPC research is to preserve the traditional call semantics despite the distribution and heterogeneity of the new environment. SUPRA-RPC overcomes a number of technical difficulties, stemming from scoping, side-effects and other sources, to support the passing of subprograms as RPC parameters. The SUPRA stub generator extracts information from not only remote entry interfaces, but from any scope potentially referenced by a subprogram passed as an RPC parameter. In addition to the usual call- and accept-stubs and the (un)marshalling routines, the generator constructs, out-of-scope access-, callback- and callback-handling- and other stubs and modified parameter subprograms. The SUPRA runtime support manages a runtime symbol table to keep track of referencing environments and out-of-scope objects, which it accesses via synchronous, 'under-the-covers' callbacks. The SUPRA process management supports servers with independent threads of control and manages (possibly nested) callbacks and pools of callback handler threads.<<ETX>>