Abstract

Distributed systems must communicate. To communicate at all requires high-level protocols be built with manageable complexity. To communicate well requires protocols efficient both in design and implementation. The ASH system provides mechanisms to address both of these needs. To manage complexity, it provides a simple interface that allows protocols to be dynamically composed in a modular manner. As a result, the complexity of building a high-level messaging service is reduced since it can be built from multiple, independent pieces at runtime. To provide efficiency, the ASH interface is designed so that the message processing steps of each protocol (such as checksumming, byteswapping, encryption, etc.) can be dynamically integrated into a single specialized loop that touches each byte of the message at most once. The ASH system is the first to dynamically integrate the data processing elements of each protocol. This ability is crucial since without it dynamic protocol composition cann...

Citations