CS252: Graduate Computer Architecture
Spring 1996, Final Project
Characterization of the "Hollow Client" Processor in a Distributed Design Environment
Naji Ghazal [ naji@eecs.berkeley.edu ] and Wing Leung [ wleung@ic.eecs.berkeley.edu ]

[ Abstract | Table of Content | Content] ]

Abstract

The recent and continuing advent of the World-Wide-Web as the means of choice for communication, advancements in distributed computing systems, new media techonolgy, and software platform-independence, have given rise to the idea of establishing a computing environment whereby the user's computer "is the network." In this project, we take our research group's approach to the network computer, which we call the "hollow client", and charcterize some of the issues involved in feasibly making this computer a powerful window to the computing resources throughout the net. We see this accomplished by placing most of the computing tasks on the net, while keeping enough compute performance on the user's machine to guarantee satisfactory real-time performance. It is our view that even with sufficiently high network bandwidth, and ideal memory system at the user's end, response time for the interactive tasks that interface the user with the network will set a lower bound on the performance requirement on the client machine. With a limit set on average network transfer size, and a limit on the frequency of network access relative to other locally executed tasks, the dependence on network performance can be minimized. It is then under such premises that the local performance lower bound will be the governing factor of the hollow client feasibility.

Table of Content

1.0 Introduction

2.0 Related Work

2.1 Look into computing resources and tools

2.2 define the common operations

2.3 Tracing the operations

2.4 Evaluating the traces

3.0 Design Rationale

4.0 Technical Results and Analysis

4.1 Exploring the "Hollow Client" Common Operations

4.1.1 Dynamic Instruction Frequencies

4.1.2 Instruction-level Parallelism

4.1.3 Minimum MIPS requirements to achieve real-time performance

4.2 Impact of the Network

4.2.1 Effect of Data Transfer Size on Performance of Network Access Operations

4.2.2 Effect of Network Access Frequency on Network Access Performance

5.0 Future Work

6.0 Summary

7.0 References

8.0 Appendix

8.1 Machines informaton


Content of the report


CS252 Project: Characterization of the "Hollow Client" Processor in a Distributed Design Environment
Last updated: May 8, 1996