 Service: Concept, Architecture and Implementation”, ISBN: 7030145763), which could provide users with more intelligent, personalized and comprehensive computing services.
Based on the Transparence Computing paradigm, the present invention provides a computing system which consists of client-side and server-side devices, as well as the booting method of its client devices, and the self-organizing method of its server clusters. In particular, the invention is an NC (Network Computing) system based on the Transparence Computing paradigm.
The concept of the Network Computer was brought forward in 1995 by Ellision, who developed Oracle. Simplifying the hardware of the PC, the initial NC is a low-cost, diskless system with an embedded system in its main board ROM. Its software consists mainly of a Java virtual machine and a WWW browser. After the embedded OS has been run, it downloads and loads Java Applets stored on the servers by the WWW method. The representative NC of this kind is the Java station NC of SUN Microsystems®. It has a similar but simpler hardware configuration than the PC. As for software, it has an embedded OS in local ROM (JavaOS), and can support Java virtual machine and Internet protocols. After the local embedded OS has been run, it can access programs and data stored on application servers. This kind of NC can support very limited applications and cannot support prevalent Windows applications.
NetPC is another similar solution provided by Microsoft. Like a normal PC, NetPC has a local hard disk, but it does not store any OS. After being powered on, it downloads an OS and applications from servers to its local hard disk, and then executes all of the applications locally. However, NetPC has less flexibility and scalability than the traditional PC. It can only run the Microsoft Windows® operating systems. Moreover, it downloads and loads not only the OS, but also all applications to the local hard disk in one batch, which could easily result in a strong network traffic burst and possible network congestion. NepPC also cannot support running large software. Like the traditional PC, another disadvantage of NetPC is that its hardware has to be upgraded very frequently to meet the ever-growing needs of the user.
The Thin Client is a concept derived from the client/server paradigm. The Thin Client has simpler hardware than a PC, having no local hard disk. It has a large capacity ROM on the main board to store an embedded OS or X-Terminal protocol codes. After being powered on, the Thin Client only runs the embedded OS or the X-Terminal protocol codes on it, and accesses programs and data on servers. The most important attribute is that the computing does not need to be implemented locally because the running of application programs and the processing of data are all done by the remote servers. The client only deals with the reception and displaying of computing results. The Thin Client is a descendant of the dumb terminating technique. The WBT (the Window-Based Terminal) is a type of Thin Client. The Thin Client does not carry on any computing and data processing tasks on the client. It is only responsible for the users interface processing, so the performance requirement of the server is very high. When some applications with intense computing requirements are needed (e.g. a multimedia encoding/decoding application) the maximum load capability of the server will be greatly limited.
In short, as for the various existing computer forms, because of the limitation of their designing paradigm, users have to perceive the location of computing resources including application programs, supporting toolkits, and the OS. Therefore, problems exist such as: the client-side devices have excessive computing dependence on servers; the system has minimal support for multimedia applications; upgrading software is difficult; and manageability is poor. Therefore if the traditional NC system can adopt the paradigm of Transparence Computing, the OS and initial applications will be downloaded from server to local diskless NC client 