Datacenter RPCs Can Be General and Fast

It is commonly believed that datacenter networking software must sacrifice generality to attain high performance. The popularity of specialized distributed systems designed specifically for niche technologies such as RDMA, lossless networks, FPGAs, and programmable switches testifies to this belief. In this article, we show that such specialization is not necessary. eRPC is a new general-purpose remote procedure call (RPC) library that offers performance comparable to specialized systems while running on commodity CPUs in traditional datacenter networks based on either lossy Ethernet or lossless fabrics.