US 20060117172 A1
A computing system based on Transparence Computing consists of clients and a server. There is no disk and no preinstalled OS on the client; a remote booting chip is set on the client's mainboard for downloading and loading the OS. Boot-supporting services, OS kernel mirrors, and applications are preset on the server; After being powered, the client broadcasts the boot request to the network and the server allocates network parameters for it. The client downloads an OS-selecting script from the server. After the user selects the needed OS, the client downloads and loads the selected OS from the server. Hence, the client fulfills the user's computing requirements just as a normal PC. The computing work is implemented on the client-side, during which the client can acquire corresponding resources such as applications, data, and documents from the server on demand. The client can be provided with private storage across the network by presetting a service in the mirror for creating virtual disks on the server, and thus data generated during or after the computing can be persistently stored on the server's storage.
1. A computing system based on the transparence computing, comprising clients and a server connected by a computer network, wherein
(1) the client motherboard has components of: a low power-consumption CPU, host bridge, south bridge, main memory, BIOS, PCI BUS, NIC, and other peripheral adapters;
(2) there is no disk and no preinstalled OS on the client;
(3) a remote booting chip is set on the motherboard, which stores codes of the remote booting protocol for OS remotely downloading and loading;
(4) there are boot-supporting services, varied OS kernel mirrors, applications, documents and data preset on the server;
(5) users' computing requirements are served by the system according to the following steps
a) after the client powers on to have the local environment and network initialized, the remote booting chip is detected under the CPU's control, and the booting procedure is started on the network;
b) the remote booting codes stored in the remote booting chip are executed and the booting request is broadcast by the client on the network;
c) after receiving the booting request from the client, the server sends a response to the client, including its allocated network parameters
d) the client sends download request to the server for the OS selecting menu script;
e) the server sends the OS selecting menu script to the client, including available OS mirror options
f) the client then executes the received OS selecting menu script, and user makes the selection;
g) the client sends the download request to the server for the mirror of the selected OS kernel
h) the server sends the mirror of the selected OS kernel to the client
i) the client receives and loads the mirror of the selected OS kernel
j) hereafter, the client fulfills computing requirement requested by user, like a normal PC, the computing is implemented on the client locally, and according to the application requirements, the client can acquire corresponding resource, such as application programs, data, and documents from the server.
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7. The client-booting method for the system based on the transparence computing the system comprising clients and a server connected by computer networks for supporting broadcasting wherein the said client has no disk and no preinstalled OS, the said server stores varied OS kernel mirrors and initial applications for booting a client, and a client is booted according to the following steps:
i. after being powered on, the requesting client broadcasts the boot request to the network
ii. after receiving the boot request from the client, the server sends a response to the client, which contains allocated network parameters
iii. the requesting client sends download request to the server for downloading the OS kernel mirror, and then the 