RMIX: A Dynamic, Heterogeneous, Reconfigurable Communication Framework

Abstract

RMIX is a dynamic, heterogeneous, reconfigurable communication framework that allows software components to communicate using various RMI/RPC protocols, such as ONC RPC, Java RMI and SOAP, by facilitating dynamically loadable provider plug-ins to supply different protocol stacks. With this paper, we present a native (C-based), flexible, adaptable, multi-protocol RMI/RPC communication framework that complements the Java-based RMIX variant previously developed by our partner team at Emory University. Our approach offers the same multi-protocol RMI/RPC services and advanced invocation semantics via a C-based interface that does not require an object-oriented programming language. This paper provides a detailed description of our RMIX framework architecture and some of its features. It describes the general use case of the RMIX framework and its integration into the Harness metacomputing environment in form of a plug-in.