17th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP’99) Published as Operating Systems Review, 34(5):32–47, December 1999 The interactive performance of SLIM: a stateless, thin-client architecture ✽ ✽ ✝ Brian K. Schmidt , Monica S. Lam , J. Duane Northcutt ✽ Computer Science Department, Stanford University {bks, lam}@cs.stanford.edu ✝ Sun Microsystems Laboratories
[email protected] Abstract 1 Introduction Taking the concept of thin clients to the limit, this paper Since the mid 1980’s, the computing environments of proposes that desktop machines should just be simple, many institutions have moved from large mainframe, stateless I/O devices (display, keyboard, mouse, etc.) that time-sharing systems to distributed networks of desktop access a shared pool of computational resources over a machines. This trend was motivated by the need to provide dedicated interconnection fabric — much in the same way everyone with a bit-mapped display, and it was made as a building’s telephone services are accessed by a possible by the widespread availability of collection of handset devices. The stateless desktop design high-performance workstations. However, the desktop provides a useful mobility model in which users can computing model is not without its problems, many of transparently resume their work on any desktop console. which were raised by the original UNIX designers[14]: This paper examines the fundamental premise in this “Because each workstation has private data, each system design that modern, off-the-shelf interconnection must be administered separately; maintenance is technology can support the quality-of-service required by difficult to centralize. The machines are replaced today’s graphical and multimedia applications.