Harnessing User-Level Networking Architectures for Distributed Object Computing Over High-Speed Networks

In a distributed object system such as Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) [5, 7], legacy transport protocols used for communication limit the performance over high-speed networks. By making use of a low-latency, high-bandwidth, and low overhead user-level networking architecture such as Virtual Interface (VI) Architecture [8, 18] this performance bottleneck can be significantly reduced. Since user-level networking architectures provide low-level primitives, the challenge lies in integrating them into high-level applications. This requires a systematic approach. In this paper, a methodology to utilize VI Architecture to improve the performance of DCOM using custom object marshaling is developed. Initial experimental results demonstrate that the latencies of small messages in distributed object computing can be significantly reduced by this methodology.