Overview

Mercury is composed of three main layers:

1. the network abstraction layer, which provides a high-performance communication interface on top of lower level network fabrics.
2. the RPC layer, which provides users with the necessary components for sending and receiving RPC metadata (small messages). This includes serialization and deserialization of function arguments;
3. the bulk layer, which provides the necessary components for handling large arguments---this implies large data transfers through RMA;
4. the (optional) high-level RPC layer, which aims at providing a convenience API, builds on top of the lower layers and provides macros for generating RPC stubs as well as serialization and deserialization functions.

These three main layers can be summarized in the following diagram:

By definition, an RPC call is initiated by one process, referred to as origin, and forwarded to another process, which will execute the call, and referred to as target. Each side, origin and target, uses an RPC processor to serialize and deserialize parameters sent through the interface. Calling functions with relatively small arguments results in using a short messaging mechanism exposed by the network abstraction layer, whereas functions containing large data arguments additionally use a remote memory access (RMA) mechanism. Note that when the bulk data is small enough, Mercury will automatically embed it along with the metadata if it can fit.