What Is RPC? (Introduction to RPC)

## What is Remote Procedure Call?

Remote Procedure Call is a technique for building distributed systems. Basically, it allows a program on one machine to call a subroutine on another machine without knowing that it is remote. RPC is not a transport protocol: rather, it is a method of using existing communications features in a transparent way. This transparency is one of the great strengths of RPC as a tool. Because the application software does not contain any communication code, it is independent of

- The particular communications hardware and protocols used
- The operating system used
- The calling sequence needed to use the underlying communications software

This means that application software can be designed and written before these choices have even been made. Because it takes care of any data reformatting needed, RPC also provides transparency to byte ordering and differences in data representation (real number formats, etc). RPC is not a new technique. It was first investigated thoroughly by Nelson [1] in 1976 and has been in use in academic and commercial areas for many years [2,3,4,5,6].

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