Remote procedure calls are the workhorse of distributed systems. However, as software engineering trends, such as micro-services and serverless computing, push applications towards ever finer-grained decompositions, the overhead of RPC-based communication is becoming too great to bear. In this paper, we argue that point solutions that attempt to optimize one aspect of RPC logic are unlikely to mitigate these ballooning communication costs. Rather, we need a dramatic reappraisal of how we provide communication. Towards this end, we propose to emulate message-passing RPCs by sharing message payloads and metadata on CXL 3.0-backed far memory. We provide initial evidence of feasibility and analyze the expected benefits.

翻译：远程过程调用是分布式系统的核心支柱。然而，随着软件工程趋势（如微服务和无服务器计算）推动应用向更细粒度分解发展，基于RPC的通信开销正变得难以承受。本文论证：试图优化RPC单一环节的局部方案难以缓解此类不断膨胀的通信成本，我们需要从根本上重新审视通信方式。为此，我们提出通过共享CXL 3.0支持下的远程内存中的消息负载与元数据，来模拟基于消息传递的RPC机制。本文提供了可行性初步验证，并分析了预期收益。