ITR: An Experimental Study of Thin-Client Computing Architectures

Columbia University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

The recent and growing popularity of thin-client systems makes it important to develop techniques for analyzing and comparing their performance, to assess the general feasibility of the thin-client computing model in modern networking environments, and to determine the factors that govern the performance of these architectures. This project involves carrying out a series of experiments to gain information and understanding on the effectiveness of thin-client architectural mechanisms for graphical and multimedia applications in various network environments. These experiments include performance analysis using several real applications as well as controlled experiments with specialized micro-benchmarks designed to isolate particular aspects of thin-client architectures that have significant impact on overall application performance. Application and user workloads will be varied to understand and analyze the scalability of different remote display mechanisms in terms of network and server resources. These experiments will be conducted in a testbed environment in which network characteristics such as bandwidth, latency, and packet loss are varied in a controlled manner to understand their impact on thin-client architectural design choices. The results of these experiments will have a fundamental scientific impact by laying a quantitative foundation for future innovations in thin-client computing research.