dmk@nucs.cs.nu.oz (David Koch) (02/15/90)
We are contemplating the acquisition of a substantial number of colour X-display terminals for use by undergraduates in the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture. Initially the facility will be used by Computer Science students while other departments gradually acquire X11 based applications. The Computer Science students will be simple using the multiple windowing environment for editing, compiling & debugging of programming assignments. We know that this works. The real question is; Are X-display terminals coupled to a significant (15-20MIPS) compute server (X11 client!) able to equal or exceed the performance of individual workstations (eg. SUN 3/80, Apollo 2500/3500 etc of ~3 MIPS performance) for graphically based CAD applications at a level you would expect of undergraduates in areas such as 2D & 3D draughting, solids modelling, finite element analysis, analogue/digital-logic simulation, etc. My feeling is that they will. Undergraduate students do not tend to be adept at harnessing the power of any terminal, be it a dumb VDU or a graphics workstation. They tend to spend far greater time figuring out what to do next that actually doing it. This would tend to suggest that each user is then likely to see a substantial portion of the X-clients power (say 20 MIPS) whereas in the individual workstation approach ~3 MIPS. Has anyone out there got experience to bear this out, or to quash the idea? David Koch, Professional Officer Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science University of Newcastle, NSW 2308, Australia. Ph: (049) 685-593 or -453, Fax: (049) 601-712, ACSnet: dmk@nucs.nu.oz