Never heard of or used gRPC. According to their website, it’s a high performance open source RPC framework. I’m wondering if this package is used outside of academia. Probably is and probably is actually used within Amazon.
What I do know
Google Protobuf. Fortunately, I have some experience with Google Protobufs since we use message serialization format within our stack (and the technology itself is quite ubiquitous)
Multi-threading. Prior to joining the OMSCS program, I had little to no understanding how threads worked and how they differed from processes. But since then, I have a much more intimate understanding of threads and even written several multi-threaded applications, both in graduate school and in a professional work setting. So I actually feel quite comfortable and prepared for project 3.
Questions I Have
What does the gRPC framework offer? What advantage does using this framework have over just a simple HTTP framework? What problem does gRPC solve? Is it similar to an OS’s RPC framework but extended so that it works across hosts?
What does the wire protocol look like for gRPC? Does gRPC dictate the wire format or not?
What I’m hoping to learn
Best practices for thread pools. Seems pretty straight forward to create a pool of threads and design the system in such a way that each thread will grab work from a (bounded) buffer. But what else should I consider?
How I might use gRPC for future projects. In the previous project (i.e. Project 2), I learned about OpenMP and MPI and convinced that if I ever need to write parallel software, I would use those libraries and runtime engines. Maybe the same will be true once I start fiddling with gRPC?
